'The between days were days of pure white heat.'
Summer is swelling around the village. Heat is surging, people are whispering about a great hungry wave, and in the garden, Anna is kicking her dying dog on the grass.
But someone is watching her. The girl. Ava.
Outside, the brutal summer blisters on. Inside, over the course of one claustrophobic week, Anna and Ava become caught up in their own world. Become swallowed by each-otherness. But what does Ava really want?
As faces fray and secrets splinter, the past casts the present anew, and Anna and Ava are forced to reckon with who they truly are. Because who we are, The Spit warns us, is not always the same as what we are to each other.
Braiding climate chaos, lust, poetry and violence, Ali Millar's debut novel is a contemporary fable against images and their enduring hold on us. Attuned to the knotty texture of reality, AVA ANNA ADA asks us to confront the way things look in the dark.
Then, without warning, the thing that happens when we're looking the other way.
To be published by White Rabbit in January 2024.