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 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction
LONGLISTED - 2025 Voss Literary Prize
HIGHLY COMMENDED - 2025 Davitt Award for Adult 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.
