Winner of Best Fantasy Novella, 2020 Aurealis Awards. Winner of Best Young Adult Short Story, 2020 Aurealis Awards. Finalist for Best Science Fiction Novella, 2020 Aurealis Awards. Anika has nowhere left to run. Stuck at the edge of the desert and unable to return home, she and her dingo companion steal from travellers about to cross the climate-ravaged sands to Alice Springs. Such journeys are fraught with danger: heatstroke, dehydration, snakebite. Many people die trying to reach Alice, Anika knows this first hand. She tried once and nearly lost everything. But when she gets caught stealing, her hand is forced. With a group of enraged, gun-toting travellers on her trail, she must run one last time. She must face the desert and its ghosts again. This time, there's no turning back.
Author
Nikky Lee is an award-winning author who grew up as a barefoot 90s kid in Perth, Western Australia on Whadjuk Noongar Country. She now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand with a husband, a dog and a couch potato cat. In her free time she writes speculative fiction, often burning the candle at both ends to explore fantastic worlds, mine asteroids and meet wizards. She's had over two dozen stories published in magazines, anthologies and on radio. Her short fiction has been shortlisted six times in the Aurealis Awards with her novelette Dingo & Sister winning the Best Young Adult Short Story and the Best Fantasy Novella categories in 2020. In 2021, she received a Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her debut novel The Rarkyn's Familiar won the 2023 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Youth Novel, three 2022 Indie Ink Awards, Bronze in Young Adult Fiction at the 2022 Foreward INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and was a finalist in the 2022 Aurealis Awards for Best Young Adult Novel.
