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That dumbshit map. I’d been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here … That map had been a serious mistake’
The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville – where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.
‘Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again. This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers’ Philip Kerr
The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville – where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.
‘Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again. This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers’ Philip Kerr
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Reviews
His story-telling is so deft, and the build-up so detailed and convincing, that the denouement proves to be heart-thumpingly effective
A comic triumph
Fluent and entertaining ... a highly accomplished debut... there is an art to telling shaggy-dog stories well, with the right balance of lightness and suspense, and Kennedy shows himself a master of it.
Pulls off that most difficult feat of being hilariously funny and frightening at the same time