Highway Thirteen
Represented by Stephanie Cabot
Winner of the 2024 Story Prize
2025 NSW Literary Awards Winner – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
A gripping, enigmatic linked short story collection 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 for a series of brutal murders. 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.
Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection 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 childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.
What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.
Reviews
“Highway 13 is an accomplished collection, stylish and lyrical in its prose and deeply sensitive in its characterisation. The stories are richly layered, often turning back on themselves or in unexpected directions, and McFarlane’s precision and craft are one of the great pleasures of the book.”—The Guardian
“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
“McFarlane contemplates the ripple effects of violent crime in 12 intricately layered stories…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, starred review
“In these eerie and insightful linked stories, McFarlane (The Sun Walks Down) explores a serial killer’s rampage and its impact on an Australian community… 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.”—Publishers Weekly
“This Möbius 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
“[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
“Her stories are set in different decades and on different continents, and the people in them come from every class and walk of life, but McFarlane sets them off on journeys that are compulsively suspenseful and enormously readable. I had to resign myself to reading each story from beginning to end without leaving my chair. They are that gripping, though not in a thriller kind of way. You have to know what happens to these people, and how they confront losses that no one should ever have to suffer.”—Mary Ann Gwin, Los Angeles Times