The Dry: Home

"Jane Harper published three international bestsellers - The Dry (2016), Force of Nature (2017), and The Lost Man (2018) - in three years ... "

" ... Jane has won numerous top awards including the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year ... "

"Jane Harper was an amateur novelist dreaming of getting her first book into the world. But the response she got when she did – from readers, critics and even Reese Witherspoon – was one she never dared to predict It sparked a ferocious bidding war between international publishers, bagged a six-figure three-book deal, had its film rights snapped up by Reese Witherspoon and ended up topping bestseller lists here and around the world ... "

" ... I started writing the book because I always thought I wanted to write a novel but never did,” Harper said. “My main goal was just to get it finished. It seemed like a huge task — so many words! So I thought I’d treat it as a learning exercise, and maybe write a better one next time.” ... "

"Every now and then an Australian crime novel comes along to stop your breath and haunt your dreams. The Broken Shore by Peter Temple was one, Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher another. Both are books that capture something profound about the Australian landscape and the people who inhabit it ... "

" ... The main town in The Dry, Kiewarra, is fictional, but it bears strong similarities to real-life communities in the Victoria region of Australia, where author Harper often traveled as a business journalist to report on the region’s difficult environmental and economic conditions ... "

" ... The book hadn’t even hit shelves when producer Bruna Papandrea and screenwriter-director Robert Connolly started planning the film. Papandrea is perhaps best known today for adapting Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies for HBO, which swapped Sydney’s northern beaches for affluent, coastal California – but there was no separating The Dry from its western Victorian backdrop ... "

"Jane Harper’s best-selling novel The Dry is one of those books that feels written with a feature film adaptation in mind: a genre narrative (crime mystery-thriller) that’s pacey, plot-driven and full of dialogue, with a central location ripe for cinematic imagery. Extensive use of flashbacks is built into its structure, and they’re even presented in italics as if to say, “This is where the cuts and scene changes go" ... "