Highway Thirteen : Stories

Finalist for the Story Prize

Named a New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year and a Best Fiction Book of the Year by Vulture, Minnesota Star Tribune and Kirkus

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

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.