AustLit

'The storyline of Hitch, the deserving winner of the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize, is a hitchhiker’s progress. Kathryn Hind’s hurting protagonist, Amelia, hitches with her dog through outback South Australia, randomly encountering strangers who ­respond variously to her vulnerability, some with concern, others with indifference or opportunism.' (Introduction)

'The arrival of cinema is something that, like the Great War, has slipped out of living memory but only barely. We can just make out its faint glow over the temporal horizon. Yet the shift it instituted in our sense of reality is scarcely possible to imagine. There was an endless pictorial before, when we recorded the world as a series of static images, and then the rush of after, that ‘‘silver quickening’’ when the noun of our visual depictions became a verb.' (Introduction)