Blue Giant

Planet Earth is cooked. Abby Horne wants off.

Abby always believed she was destined for great things. But her dream career as an industry-disrupting fashion designer went up in smoke, and her aspirations to become a world-renowned yogi and/or save the endangered tigers proved equally fruitless. She's in her early thirties, suffering the unbearable burdens of adulthood and anonymity, when she wakes up after a drunken bender with an all-new, all-consuming purpose in life: to be the first person on Mars.

Perfect timing - Danish tech entrepreneur Tor Skovgaard is currently recruiting for a one-way mission to colonise the red planet. Abby knows this is it: her last-ditch bid for purpose and glory. And if she can't be humanity's saviour . . . . she'll settle for being its martyr.

Blue Giant is an unruly eulogy for millennial optimism - a deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness.

• Format: Paperback / softback
• Pages: 288
• Imprint: University of Queensland Press
• Supplier: Penguin Random House Distribution
• Subjects: Code FA (scheme 12), Code FBA (scheme 93), Code FXN (scheme 93), Code FXE (scheme 93), black comedy; literary fiction; contemporary fiction; satire; dark humour; Mars; existential crisis; space mission; flawed female protagonist; redemption arc; absurdist; toxic friendship; growing up; disappointment; millennial; sad girl novel; hangover; mental illness; unlikeable main character; Anthropocene; climate fiction; melbourne; big time; eat the rich; anti-capitalist; late capitalism; unhinged fiction; school reunion; bullying; antihero; antiheroine; failure; ambition; ottessa moshfegh; patricia lockwood; olivia liang; sayuka murata; madeleine gray; pynchon