Clunes’ Booktown on Sunday author talks series returns for 2017 with award-winning Australian novelist, Jane Harper.
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Ms Harper published the atmospheric thriller The Dry in May 2016. It is her first novel.
The novel has since made it onto many 'best of' lists, including the ABC Book Club's ‘Five of the Best for 2016’. It was also shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards Debut Fiction 2017.
It won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015.
The fictional town of Kiewarra features heavily in the novel, a drought-stricken community in regional Victoria, Australia, five hours from Melbourne.
When farmer Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself, old wounds start bleeding into fresh ones and secrets are exposed. Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals. He is loath to confront the people who rejected him 20 years earlier.
"Every so often a debut novel arrives that is so tightly woven and compelling it seems the work of a novelist in her prime. That's what Jane Harper has given us with The Dry, a story so true to setting and tone it seemed I fell asleep in Virginia only to wake in Australian heat," wrote author John Hart in The New York Times’s review of the book.
I feel The Dry is a mystery at its heart but, as I was writing, it became a book about many other things as well
- Jane Harper
Ms Harper says that when writing The Dry, her aim was to write the kind of book she would enjoy reading herself; one with a mystery element and a few twists and turns along the way.
“I feel The Dry is a mystery at its heart but, as I was writing, it became a book about many other things as well – community pressures, what happens when the bonds of loyalty are stretched too far, and how difficult it is for anyone to ever really shed their past,” Ms Harper said.
Jane Harper has worked as a print journalist for 13 years both in Australia and the UK.
Booktown on Sunday monthly author talks were established in 2013 and run on the third Sunday of the month.
They were designed to put the emphasis on Clunes "being a Booktown" rather than simply "having a book festival,” say the organisers, Creative Clunes.
Previous Booktown on Sunday authors include Tim Fischer, Klaus Neumann and Ramona Koval.
March's visiting author is Cath Crowley of Words in Deep Blue.
Jane Harper will discuss and sign The Dry at The Warehouse, 36 Fraser Street, Clunes on Sunday 19 February, 2pm to 3pm.
