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
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 Davitt Award for Adult Fiction
SHORTLISTED - 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction
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
