So I drive until first light and only stop when the plain turns black and there’s nothing between us and the horizon but clinkers and ash.

I pull up. Drop the sidescreen. The southern air is mercifully still this morning, and that’s the only stroke of luck we’ve had in days. I know what wind does to an old fireground. In a gale, the ash can fill your lungs in minutes. I’ve seen comrades drowning on their feet. Clambered over the windrows of their bodies.

I wrap the scarf over my nose and mouth. Hang the glasses from my neck. Crack the door. And step down. Testing the surface as gently as I can. Ankle-deep. To the shins at worst. No sound out here but the whine of our rig’s motors.

Stay there, I call.

I know she’s awake, but the child, slumped in the corner of the cab, does not move. I walk back gingerly to check the trailer. Everything is still cinched down as it should be – the maker, the water, pods and implements – although the days of hard running have left my greens in disarray. The leafier edibles are windburnt, but overall the losses seem manageable. I tap the reservoir to fill my flask. Then, with the glasses, I scan the western approaches. No plumes, no movement. We’re clear.

Tim Winton’s post-apocalyptic new novel is terrifying and brilliant

A man and young girl drive across a scorched Australian outback in Juice, an extraordinary new sci-fi novel where nothing is what it first seems, says Emily H. Wilson

I try to swipe the dust from the films and panels, but it’s pointless. In a minute or so every generating surface will be furred with ash again. I just need the turbines to trickle in enough juice to get us across.

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Back at the cab, I thump my boot heels on the step and climb in. She hasn’t moved, and why that should be both a relief and vexation is beyond me.

We’re okay, I tell her. We’ll make this.

She gazes out across the scorched land.

This place, I say. It was all trees once. I flew across it. When I was young.

She blinks, inscrutable.

It went on and on. Trees beneath us for hours. The smell – you just wanted to eat the air.

She maintains her silence.

Have you flown?

Nothing.

I know you’ve been at sea. Just wondered if you’d been up in a stat.

She shifts and tilts her head against the sidescreen.

It’s really something.

She offers no sign of interest. Sits back, leaves a smear of sun paste on the glass.

But just once, I say, I would’ve liked to fly for the sake of it, not because I was on my way to somewhere horrible.

The sun appears. Molten. Slumped at the edges. Liquifying before us like a burning blimp. Until it rises. Breaks free of all comparisons to become its unmistakable self. Something reassuring. And terrible.

I talk too much, I declare. And you? You never say a word. Once upon a time I never said enough. So I was told.

She gives me nothing.

I know you hear me. You follow my language.

She rubs at the glass and manages to spread more grease than she removes.

Listen, I say. Those men back there, we lost them. No one’s coming for us. This morning we need to get across this ash. It won’t be nice. But on the other side there’ll be fresh country. We’ll move and camp the way we did before. Okay? Until we find ourselves a situation. There’ll be somewhere. We’ll be alright.

The child cranks her head further away. When I take my scarf and tear a long hank from it, she turns back at the sound. I pull the rest of the fabric across my nose and mouth and bind it around the skirts of my hat. And although she flinches, she does not resist when I do the same for her. There’s still dried blood on her brow where she beat herself against the dash. Her pale blue eyes seem more luminous above the mask.

There, I say. Cuts the stink a bit anyway. One day we’ll scrub this cab out. And you won’t just be watching, believe me. So. You set? There’s water here. We’ll eat on the other side.

I lift the sidescreen and set the rig into motion. Trundling just fast enough to make way, but slow enough to avoid stirring up a blizzard of ash.

On and on we go, hour after hour, over country as black as the night sky, across a fallen heaven starred with eruptions of white ash and smears of milky soot.

The vehicle staggers and wallows but keeps on until I’m down to reserve power. And then, as the midday sun drills in through the murk, I see new colours – tan, silver, khaki, bone – and the surge of relief that goes through me is almost deranging.

At the first solid ground I let the child out to privy. She seems energized by the freedom. Though when she’s done, she baulks at being hustled back into the rig so soon. I don’t manhandle her. But I do corral her. And I speak to her sharply. Because I’m tired. And still useless at this. And I really need to put some distance between us and that fireground. So when we finally get moving, the mood in the cab is low, and I’m sorry for it, but soon I have reason to be glad because when the batts finally give out, a hard gust comes in from the south, and the whole rig shakes on its axles.

I climb down stiffly. The kid gets out. I point to the dirty pillars rising into the sky in the distance behind us.

Look, I say. We could have been in the middle of that. But we’re out and upwind, see? That’s not just a lucky escape. That’s us being smart.

I crank out the shade. Set the array.

She watches the ash clouds twist northward. As the wind stiffens, they boil against one another. Then she follows me to the trailer. Watches as I dole out some mash. Accepts the dixy and the spoon. On her haunches, with her back to the wind, she swats away the skirts of her hat and eats. Avidly.

We can’t just be lucky, I say. You and me, we have to stay sharp.

She’s already licking her mess tin clean. I take it from her, give her mine, and while she eats I unlash my swag and roll it out beside the vehicle. Then I take down the bedroll I’ve improvised for her. Unfurl it next to mine. Not so close to make her worry, but near enough to keep an eye on her.

We’re all out of push, I say. Machine and creatures alike. So let’s sleep.

She shovels the last of the mash into her mouth, licks my dixy clean and the spoon also. Gets up, sets both back on the trailer and returns to sit, cross-legged, on her swag. She gazes east, the tail of her hat stirred by the wind.

Suit yourself, I say.

And then I’m gone. Out.

—â¶Ä”-

Sometime in the afternoon I wake to a faint keening. And for a moment I think I’m home. With an ailing hen downstairs. The whole flock at risk of contagion. Catastrophe in my compound. And I know I should get up, go straight to the growhouse, but when I open my eyes there’s just the awning shimmying in the wind above me and I’m here, on the dirt, so far south from home. And it’s the kid. Her face smeared with tears. Weeping. For the woman, I imagine, and God knows how much else besides. I reach for her, but she cringes away, so I leave her be and yield, once more, to sleep.

When I wake again the shadows of the vehicle and its trailer are long as safety ropes. The waif kips on. I clamber up, sore and creaky, to get us underway again.

© Tim Winton

This is an extract from Juice by Tim Winton (Picador), the February 2026 read for the 51¶ŻÂţ Book Club. You can buy a copy , and sign up to read along with us here

My grandparents were born at the end of the 19th century, in the era of the horse and cart. My mum and dad grew up in the machine age of mass production. And I was a child of the space age.

Despite the trials of world wars and the spectre of nuclear annihilation that followed it, this was a dispensation of steadily increasing prosperity, safety and mobility. For my family, at least, it was an experience of liberation and improvement, a trajectory that reinforced faith in human progress. For each succeeding generation, prospects were enhanced. Life got better.

Well, that arc of improvement stopped with my kids. You could call it the end of a dream. But really, it’s the death of a communal delusion.

The world I was born into is not the one I’m passing on to my grandkids. The conditions of safety I inherited will not be granted to them. This is the most confronting fact of my life.

The reasons for this awful diminution of prospects are well known. The world has sickened because of the way we’ve generated energy to drive all this prosperity and improvement. The arc of progress we once lauded hid an underbelly of despoliation, oppression and theft. All that success was bought at the cost of a scorched Earth.

The world is already 1.5°C hotter than it was when my grandparents were born. On current settings, we’re tracking to double that level of heating. A world as hot as ours is already chaotic and deeply challenging for ecosystems and the creatures that depend on them. A planet with twice our level of heating is a nightmare we should avoid at all costs. Because it means some parts of the globe will be all but uninhabitable. Many millions of humans will die. Billions will live in conditions of misery.

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Some of them will be my descendants. That’s the hook for me. The idea that my safety and mobility might have been bought at the price of their suffering. That upsets me. Juice is my family nightmare.

Tim Winton’s post-apocalyptic new novel is terrifying and brilliant

A man and young girl drive across a scorched Australian outback in Juice, an extraordinary new sci-fi novel where nothing is what it first seems, says Emily H. Wilson

Now there may be places on our planet where the reality of our burning world can still be overlooked or evaded. Australia is not one of them.

In north-west Australia, where I live, the climate has already grown extreme. Yesterday it was 50°C. Because of increased storm intensity, homes are almost uninsurable.

When people ask me why, so late in my career, I’ve published a dystopian novel, I must temper my response and mask my irritation. They want to know why I’ve changed tack, why I’ve suddenly switched genres. Well, the thing is, I haven’t. What’s changed is not my writing – it’s the world around me. The real question is, at this moment in history, how can I not write like this? What sort of an artist would I be if I ignored the conditions of life around me?

Is Juice a dystopian novel? You can call it that if you like. But this assumes there’s something fantastical, or outlandish, about it. And I don’t see it that way. Not with millions of humans living in dystopian conditions already. All over the world people are starving, fleeing conflict and climate extremes. In almost every instance, the horrors they face are the legacy of fossil capitalism. Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia as an opiate. It serves as a softener, an instrument of distance. And I don’t think we can afford it.

Juice is set generations from now in north-west Australia. The hard work of avoiding the worst of climate breakdown has not been done and after heating by 3°C, the world has tipped into feedback loops that make it hotter still. Nation states have collapsed. Human settlement has retreated from the equatorial regions, and those who persist at the margins – say, the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer – must live several months of the year underground. They’re actually pretty good at it. But it’s very tough.

Like most of my novels, it’s a story of family. It’s about the pressures of loyalty and liberty, geography and history. So, hardly a departure. And if it’s speculative in its framing, its speculations are not just scientific or climatic but moral and deeply personal. I’ve forced myself to imagine the lives my grandkids’ children will lead. Right here, in a landscape I love and have defended for most of my adult life.

To me, it’s a logical, emotional and imaginative extension of the world I know. Supplemented by the science and climate modelling, it reflects my experience of living in the Pyrocene in a part of the world that’s always been climatically extreme but is now on track to becoming uninhabitable.

The world of Juice is harsh. Its people are hardy and stoical. Out of tradition and stubbornness, they hold on at the margins of habitability. But as conditions deteriorate, families are forced to migrate southward in the hope of finding cooler air and viable settlements.

That’s not speculation. In northern Australia, it’s already happening. And the people being forced to migrate like Steinbeck’s Okies, are our poorest citizens. So I’m just turning the dial a little.

For all that, the greatest challenge my characters face is not climatic – it’s human. For as our hero discovers, the most valuable assets are not shelter or food or even water, but civility. This, I guess, is the heart of the novel.

What makes life sustainable is a shared sense of the common good. Fossil capitalism, the global force that curdled these people’s world, is contemptuous of that ethic. To survive, my characters must rekindle it and treasure it. And so must we. Whether we can, of course, is the real matter of speculation.

© Tim Winton

Tim Winton is the author of Juice (Picador), the February 2026 read for the 51¶ŻÂţ Book Club. You can buy a copy , and sign up to read along with us here