Transit Lounge acquires new Kenway novel

Transit Lounge has acquired world rights to East Coast Low, Lisa Kenway’s follow-up to All You Took from Me (also Transit Lounge, 2024).

East Coast Low tells the story of Meg, a dedicated but disillusioned wife trying to hold her family together in an Australian seaside town while battling to save her home from coastal erosion. Helping her in that battle is the mysterious Francine, a high-flying lawyer new to the area. “When a devastating storm hits, Meg’s husband is injured, her daughter goes missing and darker motives are revealed,” said the publisher.

An Australian writer and anaesthetist, Kenway’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including Island Online, the Meanjin blog and the Meniscus Literary Journal. An earlier version of East Coast Low was awarded a 2023 Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Fellowship, highly commended for the 2022 Writing NSW Varuna Fellowships and longlisted for the 2021 Fresh Ink Emerging Writers Prize.

Kenway’s debut novel, All You Took from Me, won the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for best debut crime fiction and was shortlisted in the Danger Awards within the debut crime fiction category.

Kenway said, “The NSW Central Coast, where I live, is currently caught up in a fierce debate about whether to build a seawall to protect a handful of homes from worsening coastal erosion. This novel emerged from my anxiety about the impact of climate change on my community and the conflicted empathy I felt for residents whose homes were under threat, but at its heart this is a story about two families and the risks we’ll take to defend the people we love.”

Publisher Barry Scott said, “East Coast Low is astounding, a page-turning domestic thriller with great characters and a real sense of humour. A novel that begins with a fraught school reunion, it had me hooked from the start.”

Transit Lounge has scheduled East Coast Low for publication in early 2027.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions