Reviews

Fourteen-year-old Colm Bell and his 11-year-old sister Lydia wake to the smell of smoke and the sound of gunfire – raiders are attacking their home. They grab their backpacks – prepacked for such an emergency – and head to the tunnel and the hills, following the escape route they have practised every day for their young lives. They don't look back.

This is a futuristic novel set in Australia when the earth has been plundered and natural resources depleted. Society has broken down completely, and small groups of people live in suspicion, desperately hording their meagre supplies.

Colm and Lydia are part of a generation of children who have never seen rain. As they wander through this Mad Max landscape, moving north to where they hope to meet up with their father, they hear of a great underground fire that is slowly incinerating the earth. They learn of the Wish Kin – people who are said to have the power to heal the earth at an event called the Rekindling. And they are captured by the Clan – a sinister group determined to rule the land and its people.

This is a haunting, lyrical story – of children abandoned to a planet that no long sustains life, their journey alone through incredible peril, and the realisation of the part they must play in this brave new world.