Hitch
Winner of the Penguin Literary Prize
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Amelia stands beside a highway in the Australian desert, alone except for her dog and the occasional road train that speeds past her raised thumb.
After her mother’s funeral, Amelia was confronted by Zach and reminded of the relationship they had when she was a teenager. She feels complicit and remains unable to process what happened. So she ran. 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.
Hitch is a raw exploration of consent and its ambiguities, personal agency and the choices we make. 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, and moving ever closer to the things she longs to escape.
Kathryn Hind, winner of the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize, writes with acuity, empathy and wisdom. She is a shining new light on the Australian literary scene.
Customer Reviews
Deja vu
3.5 stars
Author
Native Canberran. Following a stint at Cambridge, she returned to the nation’s capital (may God have mercy on her soul) where she is a PhD scholar at ANU. Published essays and short fiction to her credit, but this is her first novel. It won the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize for an unpublished manuscript.
Premise
Twenty-something girl in a funk after death of her mother from breast cancer hitchhikes around Oz with her dog, meets weirdos, works through issues, makes it back alive.
Plot
We meet Amelia and Lucy the kelpie-cross on the side of the Stuart Highway miles from the nearest town. Getting a lift hasn't proved as easy as she expected. She's getting low on water. I get it that millennials probably haven't read Wake In Fright, but they've seen Wolf Creek in one or all of its various iterations, and nothing our gal said or did convinced me she had a death wish. Finally, a young guy in a ute stops, and the weirdness starts, more of a weirdness relay, in fact, accompanied by much reflection on her mother's demise and the dude who did bad things to her when she was too young to have bad things done. (Did I mention she's a cutter?.) Eventually, she makes it to Melbourne where Sid, her best friend in the world lives. We know he's her best friend because he's the only one prepared to tell her how ripe she smells. After a shower and swim in the bay, she drives his Corolla back to where she started from, her head now together. Well, maybe not together, but good enough to be going on with.
Narrative
Third person stream of consciousness style from the POV of the protagonist. Good descriptions of the outback with some nice metaphors and similes.
Characters
Amelia is keenly drawn, if nor entirely fathomable to me, which is probably because I do not, nor have I ever, identified as a woman. The weirdos are suitably weird. Menace lurks in the background in the main, never descending into full Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sid is also weird, but good weird not bad weird. Something from the dog's perspective might have been nice.
Bottom line
This was a quick read that was well done but felt like a melange of things I'd read before.