Fiona McFarlane

"An elderly Australian woman lets a mysterious and possibly sinister caretaker into her beach-side home and into her life"--

A Novel

The Night Guest

Sun Walks Down

"A debut short-story collection from the author of The Night Guest"--

Stories

The High Places

A masterful novel by the prize-winning author of The Night Guest and The High Places, an epic tale of unsettlement, history, myth, love and art. 'Brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvellous.' Ann Patchett 'Gorgeous storytelling and superb characters . . . magnificent' Michelle de Kretser In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly - newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen - confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient landscape they inhabit. The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It's haunted by many gods - the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.

The Sun Walks Down

Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside of town. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. She claims to be a care-worker and Ruth lets her in. But who exactly is she letting in?

The night guest

Art Appreciation

Mena Calthorpe

Dyehouse

Een 75-jarige vrouw krijgt ongevraagd hulp in huis van een sterke vrouw die haar helpt de vermeende 'tijger' die in haar huis zou rondsluipen te verjagen.

roman

Tijgers in de nacht / druk 1

***Pre-order Fiona McFarlane's new book HIGHWAY THIRTEEN now - Coming July 2024*** SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 'Brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable' ANN PATCHETT 'A blazing mystery . . . tremendous' GUARDIAN 'Masterful storytelling' WASHINGTON POST 'Gloriously orchestrated . . . kaleidoscopic' IRISH TIMES 'A thrilling success' WALL STREET JOURNAL An epic tale of unsettlement, history, myth, art and love - and of a small boy lost in the Australian desert from the prize-winning author of The Night Guest and The High Places. In September 1883, in a small town in the South Australian outback, six-year-old Denny Wallace goes missing. As a dust storm sweeps across the landscape, the entire community is caught up in the search. Scouring the desert and mountains, the residents of Fairly - newlyweds, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, policemen - confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient land they inhabit. A land haunted by many gods - the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever. PRAISE FOR FIONA MCFARLANE 'I can't think of another writer working today who I admire more' KEVIN POWERS, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE YELLOW BIRDS 'An extraordinary writer' MICHELLE DE KRETSER, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF SCARY MONSTERS 'McFarlane has a gift for cutting into a story at precisely the right angle' THE TIMES 'An intelligent and distinctive voice . . . a marvel' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'An exceptionally fine writer' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'Steinbeckian Majesty' - Sunday Times

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. WINNER - 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction WINNER - 2025 NSW Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction WINNER - 2025 ALS Gold Medal WINNER - 2025 Story Prize HIGHLY COMMENDED - 2025 Davitt Award for Adult Crime Fiction SHORTLISTED - 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award SHORTLISTED - 2025 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction SHORTLISTED - 2025 Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction Book of the Year SHORTLISTED - 2025 Age Book of the Year Fiction Award SHORTLISTED - 2025 Danger Award for Crime Fiction SHORTLISTED - 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction '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. 'Remarkable ... an accomplished collection, stylish and lyrical in its prose and deeply sensitive in its characterisation.' The Guardian 'Highway 13 is vibrant and intricately crafted, from its taut sentences and pitch-perfect psychological observations to its very order of stories.' The Sydney Morning Herald 'Highway 13 is a thrilling collection that explores an uncanny restlessness haunting the Australian psyche.' The Conversation 'McFarlane is a master at just about everything: dialogue, setting, comic timing ... but her biggest accomplishment is creating an empathic bond with people whose lives are touched by unexplainable violence. Compulsively suspenseful and enormously readable.' The Los Angeles Times '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

Highway 13

Highway 13 (lp).

WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction Short-listed for the the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Named a Best Fiction Book of the Year by Minnesota Star Tribune and Kirkus A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people. In the small town of Barrow, Australia, people go about their ordinary lives. They drive to work through the dense state forest. They raise their families. They flirt and yearn. They lie and confess. Some of them leave home. Some of them return. Darkness thrums beneath the surface of these ordinary lives: the violence of one man, a serial killer whose murders made Barrow infamous. His twelve victims—women, men, mostly young—are long gone, but their deaths are felt, beyond the forest where they were buried, beyond this country, beyond even this time. In the past, where a young woman on a school trip to Rome sees something she shouldn’t have. In the present, where a man confronts an ancient grief on the suburban streets of Texas. In the future, in the hands of journalists and podcast hosts and television actors whose livelihoods hinge on the twin spectacles of loss and violence. Highway Thirteen is a luminous wonder: a book about the collisions between public and private selves, between parents and children, between history and what comes after, between the living and the dead. Fiona McFarlane’s roving vision is itself a story about stories—those we tell, retell, forget, sell, disprove, inherit, live through—and a work of extraordinary power and magic.

Highway Thirteen

Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017 'The judges recognised the mastery of form which is present in Fiona McFarlane's unforgettable collection of stunning short stories . . . highly varied in tone and brought the reader to characters, situations and places which were haunting in their oddity and moving in their human empathy.' Chair of judges of International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017, Professor Dai Smith CBE By the author of The Night Guest, a collection of fourteen scintillating short stories: surprising, wise, thought-provoking and superbly wrought. Ranging in setting from Australia to Greece, England to a Pacific island, they focus on people: their hopes, fears, dreams and disappointments, and their relationships - between ill-matched friends, daughters and mothers, fathers and sons, married couples and sisters. Some are eccentric, like the widower who believes his dead wife's mechanical parrot speaks to him, or the research scientist convinced that Charles Darwin visits him on his remote island; others delude themselves, like the mistress of a married man who thinks she's freer than her married sister. All are confronted with events that make them see themselves and their lives from a fresh perspective. It is what they do as a result that is as unpredictable as life itself.

Fiona McFarlane

About

Books

Join the club