The acclaimed Australian novelist Tim Winton returns to his abiding theme of the outback with a hard-hitting novel set in a far future of grimly plausible climate devastation and precarity. In a world where the descendants of fossil fuel barons hoard their resources and shoot to kill, the novel’s protagonist has spent years in the shadowy “Service”, whose mission is their annihilation. But when he and the child he has pledged to protect encounter a guard with a crossbow, he must tell the story of his life to stay alive. A gripping, heart-stopping story of sacrifice, betrayal and redemption by a master of the cli-fi genre.