Fiction. Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Numbing her pain with hard work, she self-medicates with prescription meds, and becomes involved in a series of increasingly dubious relationships with ill-suited unreliable men who lead her into danger. Cutting all ties, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humor and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.

Author City: Toronto, ON CAN

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a Canadian citizen for eight years and has lived in Canada for eleven. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. As an art director, her magazine credits include marie claire, Vogue, Vogue Living and Cosmopolitan, she and Longevity. She is the author of the critically acclaimed THE HUNGRY MIRROR (Inanna Publications, 2010) and, most recently, WEST OF WAWA (Inanna Publications, 2011). She lives in Toronto.

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