The landscape and culture of this remote Australian territory are magnificently evoked as a story of family secrets unfolds. You’ll be left feeling content, a little shocked and desperate for more. There’s something special about getting to the end of a book and figuring out the mystery. The characters are compelling, the plot is thrilling and the ending is so very satisfying. Her best yet it's certainly one of the finest novels of any sort, not only within the genre, that I've read in many moons.… Harper adroitly blends the tension and brisk pace of a thriller with the psychological acuity and stylish prose of literary fiction. This engrossing novel will have you thinking long after you've turned the last page.įabulously atmospheric, the book starts slowly and gradually picks up pace towards a jaw-dropping denouement. The book's title could easily relate to several of the male characters. This terrific piece of outback noir opens with the discovery of a body.… Harper… paints the menacing landscape brilliantly. The Lost Man is an even better book, gripping right to the end. Book by book, she's creating her own vivid and complex account of the outback, and its people who live where people don't live.Ĭharles Finch - New York Times Book Review The final pages of The Lost Man are somewhat predictable, but Harper is skillful enough, a prickly, smart, effective storyteller, that it doesn't matter.

By the time she reveals the (brilliantly awful) back story about Nathan's banishment from the few human comforts of Balamara-the pub, for example-the reader feels frantic for their restoration. Heat and empty space in her work defeat modernity, defeat logic, technology and even love, throwing us back upon our irreducible selves.

Harper's books succeed in part because she conveys how even now, geography can be fate.

Book review the lost man