With the end of the world coming in three days’ time, 15-year-old Jess, her secretly pregnant older sister Elise and her cosmically preoccupied parents have a lot to fit in – souls to save, fast food to savour, drink, drugs and sex to sample – before making their date with the Rapture in California. As their unemployed evangelical father drives them across the States, from Waffle House to Burger King, from dingy motel bedroom to swimming pool and casino, Jess and Elise respond to their parents’ alternating piety and self-indulgence with some unpredictability of their own.

The set-up of the story in Mary Miller’s debut novel is clever and alluring, and what follows does not disappoint – a sharp, sensuously-written road tale that is both a satirical vision of a grotesque society and a down-to-earth coming-of-age narrative told by an appealing anti-heroine who is determined to stay hopeful against all the apocalyptic odds.