(What was Cameron, a knowledgeable and beloved farmer, doing out on his own in the middle of the desert on a hot December’s day just before Christmas, without water or supplies, with his car left abandoned nearby?) There’s a truly confounding mystery at its heart. It’s also unquestionably the best thing Harper has written.Īll the elements of what made The Dry so readable are present in The Lost Man. Instead, it’s a gripping story of two men coping with the mysterious death of their brother in some godforsaken corner of rural Queensland. There’s no enigmatic Detective Aaron Falk lingering on the page. It’s also not strictly speaking a police procedural. Only The Lost Man, her new title, isn’t another sequel. This month, Harper returns with her third book after last year’s Force of Nature, a sequel to The Dry. The rest is history: Film rights sold to Reese Witherspoon’s ex producing partner Bruna Papandrea, more than 150,000 copies sold around the world, and filming about to begin on the adaptation of The Dry in Australia. Offers started coming in, auctions kicked off and on her wedding day in August, 2015, the book sold to Pan Macmillan. Judges were enamoured of how Harper managed to conjure up an unflinching portrait of the Australian outback, as well as sketch in the details of this world of strong, silent men and secret-keeping locals with just a few words. She didn’t tell anyone she was writing it and quietly submitted the finished manuscript into the Victoria Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Awards in 2015. The whole thing was part of an online course writing course and took her just a few months to complete. Harper, then a journalist in Melbourne, had written a story about a lonely police detective returning to his hometown to investigate the murder of his best friend in the mornings before heading off to her day job or in stolen hours on the weekend.

The story of how Jane Harper came to write one of the most successful Australian debuts in recent memory is the stuff of literary legend.

If you loved that bestselling Australian thriller, you’re going to love ‘The Lost Man’.

The last man jane harper