Jane Harper is an Australian author who was born in 1980 in Manchester, UK and who immigrated as a child of 8 with her family to Australia. She and her family returned to the UK where she attended the University of Kent, studying English and History. Her career started with journalism, before publishing her first novel in 2016. She has quickly made a name and reputation as an award winning and bestseller novelist. She returned to Australia in 2008 and currently lives in Melbourne.
Her four novels are all set in Australia but given her background, she writes not as an Australian-born person but as an immigrant. Her books highlight perspectives of Australia that perhaps those born there take for granted. The four novels are:
• The Dry (2016), also made into a movie
• Force of Nature (2017)
• The Lost Man (2018)
• The Survivors (2020)
Her biography, works, reviews and awards can be found on:
https://janeharper.com.au
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Harper
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jane-harper-the-thing-i-m-really-interested-isn-t-the-crime-it-s-more-the-ripple-effects-1.4453276
The book group collectively read all four of her books and we all enjoyed them. For those of us who had re-read her books, we noted that we enjoyed them very much the second time around too .
The first two of her books (The Dry and Force of Nature) centre around the detective Aaron Faulk. But more importantly, Harper introduces us to her strengths for all four books. The first strength we discussed was her portrayal the landscape as an additional character. In ‘The Dry’, the landscape is the outback in times of a two-year drought and in ‘the Force of Nature’, the landscape is the bush wilderness of Gippsland. In ‘the Lost Man’ the landscape is a cattle ranch west of Brisbane and that of the ‘Survivors’ is the ocean and coast. The weather becomes all important in the stories.
Another of the author’s strengths is her account of the relationships between the characters – parents, children, partners, friends and the people in small Australian towns with the small mindedness, secrets, rumour mills, the lightning spread of gossip, the lack of anonymity, the fractions, the blaming and rejection of people. The characters and their relationships are relatable and drawn from everyday life. The dynamics between the characters, and the characters with the landscapes, highlight tensions making each book a page-turner. This is helped by the characters speaking and leaving clues throughout the book, waiting for we readers to spot them.
The author is often not just writing about a murder mystery in the present but murders in the past as well, with ripples into people’s lives over decades. One of her techniques is to have one of the characters returning to the scene of a past life and events. The solving of past and present murders brings the stories to satisfying endings of truth revealed and guilt assuaged.
We all enjoyed her books very much and highly recommend them.
