Hitch / Kathryn Hind.

Winner of the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize.

A young woman stands beside a highway in the Australian desert, alone except for her dog and the occasional road train that speeds past her raised thumb. She runs from the people she has lost, from the unsaid, from who she was, but moves ever closer to the things she longs to escape. After her mother's funeral, Amelia is confronted by Zach and is reminded of the relationship they had when she was a teenager. She feels complicit and remains unable to process what happened. So she runs. Her best friend, Sid, is Zach's cousin and the one person in the world she can depend upon. But, of course, the road isn't safe either. Amelia is looking for generosity or human connection in the drivers she finds lifts with, and she does receive that. But she is also let down time and time again. Hitch explores consent and its ambiguities, personal agency and the choices we make. Hitch is raw. We know why Amelia is running, we know why she wants to return ... but it's the road in between that we focus on. But this isn't a horror, or a thriller. It's the story of twenty-something Amelia and her dog Lucy hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other, trying to outrun grief and trauma.