The Dead Heart

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.

Rootless American journalist Nick Hawthorne is en route to another hack newspaper job in the dead-end town of Akron, Ohio. He never gets there - because, while spending a few stopover days in Boston, he stumbles across a map of Australia in a second-hand bookshop. "All that space," he marvels. "All that nothing." Why not put his midlife blues on hold for a while and light out to the ultimate nowheresville? So he flies off to Darwin - a hellhole of sleazy strip joints and dangerous drunks - and then makes a dash for the bus in a van he's purchased from the founder-member of the Apostolic Church of Unconditional Faith. Spiritual enlightenment is not forthcoming, but when he meets hard-drinking Angie at a petrol station, a week of sun, surf, sex and swill seems like an acceptable alternative. But just when Nick thinks that it is time to move on, he wakes up one morning in a nightmare beyond reason. A nightmare from which there is no possible escape. Douglas Kennedy - author of such acclaimed travel books as In God's Country and Chasing Mammon - now takes us on a delirious fictional journey into the "dead heart" of the sun-scorched Outback. A stylish, original thriller, a comic tour de force, and a riveting evocation of the last real wilderness on earth, The Dead Heart is a true corker: wild, unnerving, unputdownable.