Thelma and Louise meets Mad Max might be the Hollywood tagline, but there’s a lot more to Emma Styles’s debut than the transplant of a feminist road trip classic to an Australian setting. No Country for Girls is the riveting tale of two young women from messy family situations thrust together in Western Australia, and the carnage that ensues.
After a night that goes all kinds of wrong, Aboriginal law student Nao and fists-first high schooler Charlie end up at the wheel of a dead man’s twin-cab ute with a bag of stolen gold bars stashed under the passenger seat and little idea where they’re heading. Styles does an adroit job hurling readers into the action from the get-go, creating a helter-skelter sense as Nao and Charlie try to co-exist while on the run. Tension bubbles and boils as we ride through stark landscapes with two young women who don’t trust each other.
Could the secrets each is keeping get them killed? There’s a fabulous rawness to Styles’s debut crime tale; strong voices and viewpoints that aren’t polite or prettied up. Gritty and gripping, No Country for Girls marks the emergence of a talented new crime voice.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Styles writes contemporary Australian noir about young women taking on the patriarchy. No Country for Girls is her debut novel. It won the 2020 Little, Brown UEA Crime Fiction Award, was a Val McDermid New Blood pick at the 2022 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, and has been longlisted for the 2023 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the CWA New Blood Dagger.
Emma grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Perth, Western Australia and now lives in London where she was born. She has an MA in crime fiction from the University of East Anglia and has worked as a veterinarian in country and coastal Australia and the UK. She spent her teens and twenties learning to ski, snowboard, ride horses and motorcycles, and fly small aeroplanes. She loves a road trip and once sat out a cyclone on the north west coast of WA in a LandCruiser Troop Carrier.
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