Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

‘Every one of them was a whole world, full of love and curiosity, and every one of these worlds touched hundreds of others.’

A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further – into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The Night Guest comes a captivating account of loss and fear, and their extended echoes in individual lives.

‘These sublime stories have the poise and clarity of classics. As Fiona McFarlane’s characters edge towards revelation or disaster, her artistry shines on every page.’ Michelle de Kretser, author of Scary Monsters

‘In Fiona McFarlane’s gifted hands, this Mobius strip of linked stories bends and twists the crime genre until it is barely recognisable . . . The result is a riveting study of human nature.’ Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse

‘McFarlane expands our understanding, illuminating what it is to be human . . . compulsory reading for anyone who’s ever read (or written) a tale of murder.’ Hayley Scrivenor, author of Girl, Falling

‘McFarlane is a ventriloquist in these brilliant stories, voicing our fear and fascination around atrocity, the shocking ordinariness of its perpetrators.’ Kristina Olsson

‘Every chapter is a small masterpiece in this eerie, haunting novel.’ Jack Heath, author of Kill Your Husbands

Praise for The Sun Walks Down:

‘Quite simply, the best novel I’ve ever read about 19th-century Australia. A tense search for a lost child unfolds with rising dread against a landscape of harsh and radiant beauty, amid lives as tangled as barbed wire.’ Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse

‘McFarlane’s language and unblinking historical realism are more evidence that the author is one of the legitimate talents of her generation.’ The Australian

‘The Sun Walks Down is the book I’m always longing to find: brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvellous. I loved it from start to finish.’ Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

‘Accomplished, assured, elegant and insightful – this beautifully told novel took me on the most unexpected and compelling of journeys. I adored it.’ Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin-winning author of Infinite Splendours

‘Masterful … an excellent, layered work of literary historical fiction in which McFarlane tackles many complex issues with elegance, assurance and searing intellectual insight.’ Canberra Times

‘The Sun Walks Down is an extraordinary work of fiction that I have no doubt will become a classic of Australian literature. McFarlane’s writing is assured, masterful, nothing short of brilliant.’ Emily Bitto, Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays and Wild Abandon

A gripping, provocative work by one of our finest writers, the internationally acclaimed author Fiona McFarlane. In overlapping stories, Highway 13 explores the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people. A brilliant and illuminating account of loss and its extended echoes across an entire society.

About the Author: Fiona McFarlane is the author of the novel The Night Guest, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and a collection of short stories, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Best Australian Stories and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her most recent novel, The Sun Walks Down, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award, the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Born in Sydney, Fiona teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

30 Jul 2024
 

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane ISBN 9781761067013