HAINTS STAY

Brutal, surreal and darkly funny, this bold new novel follows and ever-expanding cast of characters, each in pursuit of their own brand of justice and belonging. Colin Winnette breaks down the classic Western and builds a bloody leanto from the scraps. Brooke and Sugar are contract killers without a contract. Bird is the 13 year old who appears in their camp one night, with no memory and palms as smooth as stones, who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people. Driven from town after a bathhouse brawl, it's only a matter of time before the sheriffs will find them. Before the cannibals and stampedes and marauders will find them. Before the past will clamber up from where they buried it, covered in animal skins and teeth. The story follows Bird and the middling bounty hunters after they've been chased from town, and features gunfights, cannibalism, bar-room piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger. A novel which possesses an unsettling humour. 224pp, paperback.