WE ATE THE ROAD LIKE VULTURES (Inkerman & Blunt, 2016)

If Hunter S Thompson was a sixteen year old girl, jacked up on peyote and hormones and carrying around a nasty beat poet fetish, this is how she’d write. What glorious, clear, concise madness. Ms Lounsbury is one to watch, or more importantly, READ.  

                                                              – Rhys Muldoon

Lulu, a teenage Australian runaway on a unlikely mission, knows bullshit when she hears it and she’s hearing it from the two ‘ornery old geezers she discovers living with an Alaskan moose named Capote, and Salinger, a suicidal circus elephant, on a remote Mexican haçienda. She is on a quest that has taken her halfway around the world—hitching rides, sleeping at truck stops and generally trying to evade Interpol—to prove that ‘Chicco’ and ‘Carousel’, with their stained kaftans and hesitant prostates, were once better known as Jack Kerouac and his muse, Neal Cassady.

Lulu is prepared for anything; after all, you don’t uncover the greatest literary fraud of all time without experiencing a few bumps in the road. But she’s not expecting Adolf, the beautiful German Nazi-turned-confused Christian missionary, or his penchant for naked yoga. And she isn’t entirely equipped to handle being caught up in a shoot-out between a gang of bank robbers and the corrupt local police force, or the subsequent spell in a filthy Mexican prison.

But if Lulu has learned anything from her beloved beat generation writers, it’s that there’s nothing a good road trip (and a death-defying amount of tequila) can’t fix. Chicco, Carousel and Lulu set off for Tijuana to rescue their apparently credulous Teutonic friend and, on their way home, witness him experience a genuine, honest-to-goodness life-saving miracle, one that challenges Lulu’s cynical worldview and sets her on a new quest: to discover the truth about her mother.

Read more about the book at the Inkerman & Blunt website.

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AFTERWORD (Allen & Unwin, 2014)

Lynnette Lounsbury has the power to raise your temperature. Afterworld is full of Rowling-calibre imagination, and the ending might be the most comprehensively hopeful thing you'll ever encounter.

                                                     - Chris Lynch, Michael L. Printz Honor winner

Dom is the youngest person ever to arrive in the Necropolis, the 'waiting place' between death and what comes after. And it isn't long before he catches the attention of Satarial, a cruel Nephilim from the beginning of time, who has grim plans to use Dom as entertainment in his vicious gladiatorial games. When Dom's still-living sister, Kaide, appears in the Necropolis too, Satarial has the leverage he needs, and the stage is set for the biggest shake-up the afterlife has seen in centuries.

Dom's only option is to compete in the Trials and attempt to win the chance to enter the Maze. In his favour he has an enigmatic young Guide, Eva, and a Guardian, Eduardo, who may not be what he seems. But will they be enough?

Afterworld available from Allen & Unwin Australia