Highway 13
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
MacFarlane, with great empathy and curiosity, charts the fractal web of lives impacted by the reverberation of violence. A work with a deep sense of place and time, on the surface it is a collection of polished, funny, engaging, poignant stories but taken as a whole, becomes a darker novel about crime, how it reverberates, and how societies get drawn into it. Here are characters with wildly different life experiences—a middle-aged man waiting for love, a married professional woman reminiscing about gritty past adventures, a young Polish woman escaping poverty and isolation—connected by the menacing, haunting presence of murderer Paul Biga. Together, MacFarlane’s stories present an exploration of the Australian psyche, marked by an unsettling restlessness. She masterfully creates mood and tension, deliberately and carefully allows the reader to remain in a state of unease by giving us characters that are cruel and kind, lives that are ordinary and complex. (National Library of Australia)