Robbie Arnott
Limberlost
“Robbie Arnott is the sort of young writer we all hoped would emerge in Australia, a Conrad-like storyteller whose tales always tremble on the edge of the mythic and legendary. And as well as being a splendid narrator of tales, he has a quality too easily overlooked now. He writes beautifully! May his readers and his rewards abound!”
Text Publishing, 2022
In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.
His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.
Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.
As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.
The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.
Shortlisted, Fiction, Indie Book Awards, 2023
Commended, Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2023
Longlisted, Fiction, Booktopia Favourite Australian Book Award, 2022
Longlisted, Dylan Thomas Prize, United Kingdom, 2023
Robbie Arnott’s acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Not the Booker Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. He lives in Hobart.
