In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock and the very future have been blighted - a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. Yet is this small hope, this compassion, enough to sustain them against the despair born of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experiences they’ll never know? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?

Rise & Shine is a tale that speaks to our troubled times, a Kafkaesque fable of hope from the imagination of Miles Franklin nominee Patrick Allington.