‘This is a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale.’ Australian Bookseller & Publisher, July 2011

Critically acclaimed author Kim Westwood returns in August with her second novel, The Courier’s New Bicycle. Join Salisbury Forth on twenty adrenaline-fuelled days as a courier of contraband in the alleyways of inner Melbourne — a city of fuel rationing, rolling power outages and curfews.

Life is stressful, post-pandemic. A vaccine dispensed Australia-wide is causing mass infertility, and the government has banned all remedies except prayer. While the pious gather under the streetlights at dusk, vigilantes prowl for transgressors. When someone starts trading tainted hormones on the boss’s patch, Salisbury must find who’s trying to destroy the business before everything goes belly up …

About the Author:

In 2002, Westwood’s story The Oracle won an Aurealis Award. Since then her stories have been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies in Australia and the US, and for ABC radio broadcast. She is the recipient of a prestigious Varuna Writer’s Fellowship for her first novel, The Daughters of Moab.

Westwood developed her distinctive visual sensibility while working as a theatre performer and deviser. Darkly poetic, her stories have a preoccupation with humanity’s capacity for destruction and its equal instinct for survival. Most are set in a near-future Australia. Of this she says: ‘My imagination has a chemical reaction to living on Terra Australis and responds strongly to its particular properties.’