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Highway Thirteen is a gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.

About Highway Thirteen

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—women, men, mostly young—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 is a luminous wonder: a book about the collisions between public and private selves, between parents and children, between history and what comes after, between the living and the dead. Fiona McFarlane’s roving vision is itself a story about stories—those we tell, retell, forget, sell, disprove, inherit, live through—and a work of extraordinary power and magic.

Source: Publisher
ISBN-13: 9780374606268
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 08/13/2024

Praise for Highway Thirteen

“[A] smart, deeply moving collection . . . Readers may be tempted to hazard an opinion of who and what the killer is from the perspectives his ancestors, neighbors, the media, groupies, even the tangentially involved, offer, but in the end it is their stories — of loss, obsession and brokenness—that linger.”—Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times

“Each story . . . stands alone beautifully. Woven together, they illustrate the long-reaching, often unexpected ripple effects evil has on every life it touches.”—Jane Harper, Booklist

“However entertaining, McFarlane’s stories continually remind readers that behind true-crime stories’ escapist pleasure exist real death and human pain. Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Eerie and insightful . . . McFarlane beautifully renders the ways in which news of the crimes warps some of her cast’s relationships and causes other characters to slip into obsession. It’s a standout meditation on a community’s legacy of violence.”—Publisher’s Weekly

About Fiona McFarlane, Author of Highway Thirteen

Fiona McFarlane is the author of The Night Guest; The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize; and The Sun Walks Down. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first novel, The Night Guest, won several prizes including the Voss Literary Prize and a New South Wales Premier’s Award. It was also shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, among others. Her second novel, The Sun Walks Down, was published in Australia, the United States, and the UK.

She is also the author of a short-story collection, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize.

McFarlane grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area (!!), where she teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

You can find and follow Fiona McFarlane on her website.

Source: https://www.fionamcfarlane-writer.com/aabout

Titles by Fiona McFarlane

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