J Hawthorn

Eighteen-year-old Flynn escaped the soot-choked alleys of Melbourne with a stolen name, a pocketful of secrets, and the raw scars of a life spent under the boot. He thought the lawless frontier of the Victorian goldfields would be his salvation-a vast, sun-bleached expanse where a clever city scavenger could rewrite his destiny in gold. He was wrong. In the punishing 104-degree heat of the outback, the rules of the Melbourne slums are useless.
The red dust strips away his aliases, the blinding sun burns through his deceptions, and the ironbark scrub offers no place to hide. Waiting for him in the dirt is a new kind of monster: a ruthless frontier tyrant who smells the city smoke on Flynn's skin and vows to break him completely. Hunted across an unyielding landscape by a silent, brilliant tracker who reads Flynn's every desperate step in the clay, the former thief is stripped of his boots, his wit, and his humanity.
To survive, the boy must die so the man can be born. Left with nothing but the scars on his hands and a desperate instinct to endure, Flynn is forced to forge a deadly new identity among the outcasts, immigrants, and rebels of the camps. From the ashes of his undoing, a legendary bushranger will rise. Because when you take everything from a kid who has already survived the gutter, you don't break him-you turn him into the most dangerous mechanism the frontier has ever seen.