Trapped on the tiny prison island where her father works as a correctional officer, thirteen-year-old Rita Mae Jones longs to escape. Entranced by the stories of her grandmother's glamorous Hollywood past and convinced of her own glittering future as an internationally-acclaimed actress, the unhappy teenager yearns to break free from the island's humdrum existence. Rita Mae cannot understand why her alarmingly mismatched parents chose to come to this claustrophobic, brooding place ten years before. Even less can she undertand why her emotionally repressed, socially ambitious mother and her fond ineffectual father came to be married in the first place. But there are many things Rita Mae doesn't understand about her family. A prison riot is the catalyst that kickstarts a series of shocking revelations as the Jones family's disturbing secrets come tumbling into the open - with bizarre, alarming and wholly unexpected results.
Surreal, subversive and deliciously black, Escape Routes for Beginners is the second ingenious, inventive and extraordinary novel to affirm Kira Cochrane's position as one of the most promising new writers of the decade.
