Jane Harper lives in St Kilda, Australia, with her husband and daughter. Her thriller, The Dry: A Novel, was an Instant New york Times Bestseller, the winner of the ABIA Book of the Year (Australian Book Industry Awards) and was named Book of the Year at the 2017 Indie Book Awards in Australia. It also took out the Indie Award for the best debut fiction title. Learn more about the author, her book, as well as ratings and reviews on it.
Jane Harper was born in Manchester (UK), and moved to Australia with her family at age eight. She spent six years in Boronia, Victoria, and during that time gained Australian citizenship.
Returning to the UK with her family as a teenager, she lived in Hampshire before studying English and History at the University of Kent in Canterbury. On graduating, she completed a journalism entry qualification and got her first reporting job as a trainee on the Darlington & Stockton Times in County Durham.
Jane worked for several years as a senior news journalist for the Hull Daily Mail, before moving back to Australia in 2008. She worked first on the Geelong Advertiser, and in 2011 took up a role with the Herald Sun in Melbourne.
In 2014, she submitted a short story which was one of 12 chosen for the Big Issue’s annual Fiction Edition.
That inspired her to pursue creative writing more seriously, and that year she applied for the Curtis Brown Creative online 12-week novel writing course. She was accepted with a submission for the book that would become The Dry and wrote the first full draft during the three-month course.
More than 60,000 copies of The Dry have been sold in Australia since its launch, and it continues to sell strongly. Let’s take a closer look now at her suspense and mystery thriller.
Synopsis:
“A breathless page-turner, driven by the many revelations Ms. Harper dreams up…You’ll love [her] sleight of hand…A secret on every page.” ―The New York Times
“One of the most stunning debuts I’ve ever read… Every word is near perfect.” ―David Baldacci
A small town hides big secrets in The Dry, an atmospheric, page-turning debut mystery by award-winning author Jane Harper.
After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.
Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.
DIGITAL BOOK
HARDCOVER
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THE DRY is an amazing debut novel! This book is a page-turner, difficult to put down, with all the ingredients of a great read: good setting, strong characters, complex and credible plot, and a great deal of mystery and suspense. Jane Harper absolutely deserved to be awarded as she was for this excellent book!