In the linked short stories of Highway Thirteen (Macmillan, 2024), Fiona McFarlane (English) offers a gripping, enigmatic exploration on 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 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 won the Story Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Literary Fiction Book of the Year.
McFarlane is joined by Beth Piatote (Comparative Literature and English). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.
