Cinderfall

Five years after the bombs, a nurse in Perth discovers her brother is alive in New Zealand. Between them: a continent sealed behind razor wire, an ocean no one is permitted to cross, and a system that has decided she is useful - but not useful enough to leave.

Hana Yoshida has survived Jakarta's refugee camps, Perth's Category system, and the silence of a government that abandoned six million people and called it policy. Now, with nothing but a letter and an unofficial path south, she begins the longest journey of her life - through farming settlements, quarantine zones, and the stories of those the world left behind.

On the other side of Bass Strait, eighteen-year-old Emily Morrison fishes, gardens, and doesn't look north. Tasmania saved her. Tasmania saved three hundred thousand people. But the island that kept its lights on also closed its doors, and the wreckage washing up on King Island tells a story no one in parliament wants to hear.

When a ship appears in the strait for the first time in four years, both women are forced to confront the same question: what do the living owe the dead, and what does survival owe the truth?

The Distance is the second book in the Cinderfall series - a story about borders drawn in desperation, letters carried across oceans, and the unbearable geography between the people we love and the people we become without them.