2025 WINNER: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal ; Story Prize for short story collection ; NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (fiction) ; VIC Premier’s Literary Awards (fiction). 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 & 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.
