Rob Donnelly entered a catholic contemplative monastery in 1990. His search for truth spanned a decade when the darker realities of the institutional church were beginning to come to light. This memoir is a coming of age story set in extraordinary circumstances. It's a personal account of the journey into the catholic priesthood and the hard reality of leaving it. It's a story of whales and mystics, saints and sinners, spiritual traditions and masculine cultures. It's the story of gravity and enduring love.

Rob Donnelly is a Tasmanian writer whose work is shaped by contemplative traditions and a deep attention to what is unspoken or erased. He is the author of Out of Order, a restrained and unsentimental memoir of monastic life, and soon to be released CON, a literary novel that reimagines Australia's convict past from within the voice of the transported. Donnelly's work resists simplification. Whether writing memoir or fiction, he traces the long afterlife of exile, the tension between erasure and voice, and the fragile persistence of human dignity in the face of institutional power. His style is psychologically astute, ethically grounded, and attentive to the emotional realism of lives lived outside of triumph.