Savagely beautiful and tragic- a heartbreaking dystopian future that doesn’t feel all that far away.

This was great: think Cormac McCarthy's The Road with a dash of Mad Max. Brilliantly written and thought-provoking. I would highly recommend

Juice is the eleventh novel by award-winning Australian author, Tim Winton. In a far-future Australia, a long time after a climate apocalypse, a man drives his well-equipped vehicle through a burnt-out plain, looking for a place where he and the young girl with him might safely settle. Having already dismissed a gated compound that turns out to have armed guards patrolling forced labourers, they happen upon an apparently abandoned mine site. In a climate that requires living underground for the summer months, a mine shaft is a feasible proposition. Except that someone has already claimed it. The man suggests they can consolidate, work together, but the fellow wields a crossbow that the man recognises, and ushers them down and into a wire enclosure, where he locks them in. The man begins talking, ostensibly to establish his bona fides and justify his proposal, but perhaps also, a la 1001 Arabian Nights, to distract the bowman from using his weapon. And so, in between pleading for water and food for the child, he spends the next 500+ pages telling the bowman his life story. So there’s the life he leads with his mother as a grower, the expansion to salvage work, then his recruitment at almost seventeen, into the Service, a widespread secret organisation perhaps not unlike MI5, except non-government, a network of trained operators who team up for interdictions, acquittals of objects who are on The List: read assassinations. His story refers to The Dirty World, The Terror, The Hundred Years of Light, The Long Peace. He works with comrades who are known only for their role, or perhaps some feature: silver hair, Spanish. Keeping it all secret and separate, he has to juggle duty and family, especially once he falls in love and fathers a child. He describes the interdictions, convinced that the bowman was once also an operator in the Service. It’s a little unwieldy, when Winton, rather than naming them, refers to his characters only as “the child”, “my mother”, “the filmlayer”, “the bowman”; he gives just three characters a proper name. He seamlessly weaves in the current state of that future world and what is required to survive the harsh climate, and his descriptive prose skilfully evokes the setting. As usual, he eschews the use of quote marks for speech, which can be confusing and irritating. Probably longer than it needs to be, but a well-told tale. This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia.

An unknown narrator and a mute girl are driving across a hot desolate landscape. They arrive at an isolated compound, seemingly abandoned, perfect to settle into for while or is it. Apparently, someone else had the same idea and before long they find themselves locked in an underground cell, a man with a crossbow poised to shoot. A conversation is started and slowly the narrators story unfolds before us, a story that goes back to his childhood to his home, his mother, his father, the story of a world that has quite literally been destroyed. We never learn what year or how far in the future Winton has taken us. What we do know is that Winton portrays, a world whose climate is unrecognisable, the heat through the summer months forcing its people underground, water is scarce, there is no internet, no technology, no currency, merely a world of barter, of survival. At 17 Winton’s narrator is recruited by a secret organisation intent on assassinating the wealthy, the people that destroyed the climate and environment. His absences are long, the secret missions arduous, dangerous, his mental state forever altered. Love and loss plunge him from happiness to despair, the world continues to heat up, to become more hostile and his vision, his belief in what he does diminishes. One last final mission and he’s back home, his mother the one constant in his life finally spills some home truths, truths that upends everything our narrator ever believed. Years spent toiling on his own before the climate forces him back on the road, on the search for a new home and maybe some peace. This was a long novel with so many themes, so many questions and a multitude of answers. Thought provoking and pretty damn good.