Eta Draconis (Brendan Ritchie, UWAP)

Eta Draconis is Brendan Ritchie’s impressive third novel and the winner of the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award. This road trip story centres around two sisters, Elora and Vivienne, who are driving from their coastal hometown to the city for university. What might ordinarily be an uneventful drive is made incredibly dangerous by Draconis: a series of meteorites that have been consistently ravaging Earth since Elora and Vivienne’s adolescence. Draconis is particularly terrifying because its rocks strike randomly and with varying degrees of intensity—perhaps the two will make it to university unscathed, perhaps they won’t. This uncertainty has drastically affected the mentality of everyone living on Earth: some people live in perpetual fear and some people live large. This extends to Elora and Vivienne, and the distinct ways in which they both see the world strains their relationship. However different they are, their sisterly bond means they stick together through what turns into a nightmare—telephone communication going down, petrol running out, fellow travellers becoming frenzied and dangerous. Eta Draconis is a tense and urgent dystopian novel, but what makes it an absorbing read is the way Elora and Vivienne relate to each other and the world around them. Like all young people, they have wide-eyed hope for their lives, but the dangerous circumstances of their world mean they’re forced to readjust their expectations of their own futures as well as the future of their planet. Eta Draconis is a poetic coming-of-age story for readers who enjoy realistic dystopian fiction.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Danielle Bagnato is a book reviewer and marketing and communications professional. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews