Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Numbing her pain with hard work, she self-medicates with prescription meds, and becomes involved in a series of increasingly dubious relationships with ill-suited unreliable men who lead her into danger. Cutting off all ties with normalized daily routines, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. During the bus trip she discovers junk food, cigarettes, hash and drinks a lot of alcohol. She confuses sexual attraction with love in a series of relationships with loser bad boys and continues to put herself in destructive, potentially dangerous situations. Hardcore, she travels for the most part by Greyhound bus, sinking deeper into the underbelly of a world that offers her the anonymity she seeks. Funny, aggressive, fearless and vulnerable, Benny is a road-warrior with a backpack of opiates, a map and a guileless sense of naiveté. In seventy-two days, she travels nearly ten thousand miles overland and more by flight and train; she's a determined modern-day pioneer. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humour and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a Canadian citizen since 2003. As an art director, she has worked on marie claire, Vogue Australia, Vogue Living, Cosmopolitan, Canadian Living, and she magazines. She is the author of four novels: The Hungry Mirror (winner of the ippy Gold Medal for fiction in 2011, long-listed for the 2011 ReLit Awards); West of Wawa (one of four Chatelaine Book Club Editor's Picks, awarded the ippy Silver Medal for Fiction in 2012); A Glittering Chaos, (awarded the ippy Silver Medal for Popular Fiction in 2014); and The Witchdoctor's Bones, released in 2014 to literary acclaim.

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