Juice

A Guardian Best Sci-fi Book of 2024 A "blistering cli-fi epic" (The Guardian), Juice is a post-apocalyptic novel of survival, passion, and revenge from highly acclaimed Australian author Tim Winton. A man drives across a brutal landscape. His rig is powered by sunlight, he has a water maker and growing pods--the tools of survival--and with him travels a silent girl.

He's looking for somewhere they can be safe, and when he discovers an abandoned mine he thinks they might have found it. But the mine already has an inhabitant, who points his crossbow at the child and asks, "Is she even real?" And so, in the hope that it might prolong their survival, our man starts talking: storytelling for his life.

He talks about the place he grew up--a decimated landscape hundreds of years in the future, so hot in summer that he and his mother must live below ground--and about his recruitment to "The Service," a top-secret organization whose objective is to educate its operators as to the truth behind the state of the world and then train them to kill their targets: descendants of the clans who caused the destruction of the planet. These names appear on the unknowable "list," but the project is slowly falling apart at the seams. Powered by love for the world we live in, Juice is an adventure of epic proportions.

It is a searing, propulsive journey, a story of survival, determination, and just how far the human spirit can be pushed. Searing and propulsive, it is a story of resilience and survival that asks the question: just how far can the human spirit be pushed?