Review: HIGHWAY 13, Fiona McFarlane

• 
  This edition read as an e-book on Kindle (Amazon)
  
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CYZKF3C1
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin, July 30, 2024
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1761189234 
• WINNER - 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction
• WINNER - 2025 Story Prize
• SHORTLISTED - 2025 Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction Book of the Year
• SHORTLISTED - 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction

Synopsis (Amazon) 

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. 
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.

My  Take

An intriguing collection of 12 overlapping stories all related in some way to the murder of backpackers along an Australian highway. The stories vary in methodology and style, nor are they presented sequentially, although we are given years to place them in, and at times the author makes the reader work hard to establish the connection to the original backpacker-murder scenario.

I don't think it would really matter what order you read the stories in, although perhaps I am mistaken there.  What is interesting to me is the way each story contributes to the reader's knowledge and understanding of how people were affected by the (fictional) backpacker murders.

Highly recommended. 

My rating: 4.9 

About the author

Fiona McFarlane’s 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. She is also the author of a short-story collection, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Best Australian Stories. Her second novel, The Sun Walks Down, will be published in Australia (October 2022), the United States (February 2023), and the UK (March 2023).

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