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The Dead Heart

On sale

7th April 2005

Price: £9.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349106458

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That dumbshit map. I’d been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here … That map had been a serious mistake’

The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville – where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.

‘Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again. This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers’ Philip Kerr

Reviews

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
Pulls off that most difficult feat of being hilariously funny and frightening at the same time
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
His story-telling is so deft, and the build-up so detailed and convincing, that the denouement proves to be heart-thumpingly effective
TIME OUT
A comic triumph
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Fluent and entertaining ... a highly accomplished debut... there is an art to telling shaggy-dog stories well, with the right balance of lightness and suspense, and Kennedy shows himself a master of it.