A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories 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 for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even 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 Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost. What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.
Author
Fiona McFarlane grew up in Sydney, Australia. She studied English at Sydney University and completed a PhD on nostalgia in American fiction at Cambridge University. She spent 3 years at writing residencies in the US - at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire - before studying for a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. Fiona's first novel, The Night Guest, will be published in 19 countries and 15 languages, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, an LA Times Book Review prize, an INDIE Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and an Australian Book Industry Award. The Night Guest won a NSW Premier's Prize and Fiona was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist for 2014. Fiona's short stories have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly, Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories 2, the Missouri Review and the New Yorker. She is currently completing a collection, to be published by Penguin Australia, Sceptre (UK) and Faber and Faber (US).
