I hope it’s made the path a bit easier to give other books recognition that they deserve.” skip past newsletter promotion “What I am happy with, is if The Dry opened doors and persuaded others to give the genre a go. “There’s always been novels that have really captured Australia beautifully,” Harper says of the wave of Aussie crime fiction that has followed her. In the New York Times, the Australian critic Beejay Silcox recently wrote that Harper’s “outback noir megahit The Dry kick-started a crime-writing boom in 2016, the drought-blighted bush town became a genre trope: Australia’s sunburned answer to the arid cold of Scandi noir.” Following the success of The Dry, a whole wave of mystery books set in small-town Australia have taken over bookshops. The book also created something of a genre: outback noir.

The Dry is now the 15th highest-grossing Australian movie ever another adaptation is in the pipeline for Harper’s second Falk novel, Force of Nature, which will also star Bana. The Dry also became a hit film in 2020, starring Eric Bana as Falk. Thanks in large part to the Dry, Harper has sold 1.5m books in Australia and 3.5m worldwide. The rest is history.Įvery book has an uncertain outcome – but every now and then, due to a strange alchemy that publishers wish they could bottle, a megahit emerges. Harper wrote her debut novel around her day job as a journalist at Australian newspaper the Herald Sun and submitted it for consideration to the Victorian Premier’s Literary award for best unpublished manuscript. I wrote this book and then suddenly everything changed.” “The lives are really different – there wasn’t even really a gentle transition, it was really clearly defined. It was like night and day – my life before The Dry and after The Dry,” Harper says now. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

He begins investigating the deaths but finds he’s not always welcome. When his childhood friend turns a gun on his wife, child, then himself, Falk returns to his hometown for the funeral. We first met Falk in The Dry, Harper’s blockbuster breakout set in a small town struggling with drought. Harper’s latest novel, Exiles, is her fifth book and the third in her series following the federal investigator Aaron Falk.

The dry by jane harper book review