Synopsis: The girl who wouldn’t die, hunting a killer who shouldn’t exist… 1930’s America: Lee Curtis Harper is a delusional, violent drifter who stumbles on a house that opens onto other times. Driven by visions, he begins a killing spree over the next 60 years, using an undetectable MO and leaving anachronistic clues on his victims’ bodies. But when one of his intended ‘shining girls’, Kirby Mazrachi, survives a brutal stabbing, she becomes determined to unravel the mystery behind her would-be killer. While the authorities are trying to discredit her, Kirby is getting closer to the truth, as Harper returns again and again…

The Judges said: “The quirky fusion of the sci-fi and crime genres features a time-travelling surreal serial-killer, Harper, whose story begins as a drifter in prohibition-era Chicago. When Harper “steps into sometime else”, murdering along the way, he meets his match in the contemporary figures of Kirby, an engaging young journalism intern, and her unlikely sidekick Dan, a burned-out sports writer. The author plays with the abstractions of time, change, decay, memory, and imagination with great assurance and originality.”

Lauren Beukes is a novelist, TV scriptwriter, documentary maker, comics writer and occasional journalist. She won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel Zoo City, set in a fantastical Johannesburg where guilt manifests as spirit animal familiars. Her previous works include Moxyland, a dystopian cyberpunk thriller set in Cape Town under corporate apartheid.