Highway Thirteen

A gripping collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people.
From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places .

McFarlane serves up a slantwise approach to crime writing in this crisp suite of tales . . . clever and engrossing

McFarlane's imaginative and tonal range is astonishing ; she presents an assortment of beautifully realised characters and settings, requiring us to consider the ripples that spread out from the killings over time. A few of the stories are almost unbearably suspenseful, but McFarlane's ethical restraint spares us all voyeuristic gore. She is, simply, a superb writer

An accomplished collection, stylish and lyrical in its prose and deeply sensitive in its characterization. The stories are richly layered, often turning back on themselves or in unexpected directions, and McFarlane's precision and craft are one of the great pleasures of the book

Reading Highway Thirteen is the literary equivalent of watching an eclipse: one must trace the shadow to see the spectacle . . . A masterclass in reflection and refraction . Fiona McFarlane is interested in what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore. It is easy to conjure up devils, demons and monsters - to spin blood-soaked tales of the murder forest. Far harder, she shows, is to face our own, "ordinary" backyard cruelties

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 . . . McFarlane sets them off on journeys that are compulsively suspenseful and enormously readable

McFarlane delivers stories that are as complex as they are haunting . . . A thrilling collection that explores an uncanny restlessness haunting the Australian psyche. Its crystalline prose and keen observations about everyday life open up new ways of thinking about the historical crimes that underpin our collective unsettlement

A standout meditation on a community's legacy of violence

Addictively engaging , profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master

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

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

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

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

PRAISE FOR FIONA MCFARLANE'S THE SUN WALKS DOWN

'Steinbeckian Majesty'
SUNDAY TIMES

'Moving and masterful'
DAILY MAIL

'Brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable'
ANN PATCHETT

'I can't think of another writer working today who I admire more'
KEVIN POWERS

Fiona McFarlane 's first novel, The Night Guest , won several prizes including the Voss Literary Prize and New South Wales Premier's Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and Miles Franklin Literary Award, among others. She is also the author of the short story collection The High Places , which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Sun Walks Down , which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker , Zoetrope: All-Story , and Best Australian Stories . McFarlane grew up in Sydney and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.