Limberlost bookcover

Limberlost

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Description

The much-anticipated new novel from the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron.

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.

Robbie Arnott is one of the bright stars of Australian fiction. Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

Product Details

PublisherText Publishing Company
Publish DateApril 11, 2023
Pages240
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781922458766
DimensionsN/A

About the Author

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 for Literature. He lives in Tasmania.

Reviews

'Arnott's style has tempered into something rich and singing...[His] writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental...[Limberlost has] a breathtakingly moving final scene.' - Guardian

'Limberlost is an immersive experience, a story that is deeply embedded in the language of its environment...Though Arnott has cast fabulism aside, [this novel] retains a mythic quality...Scaled right down to a single, humble life, Limberlost is lit up by the energy of that life's relationships. It serves as a reminder of the complicated position humans occupy, tangled as we are in the webs of interdependence, of pain and responsibility and care, that bind us to a world much greater than ourselves.' - Australian Book Review

"An exquisitely moving and intimate story that is more rooted in realism than Arnott's previous works, but still carries the wonder and subtle magic his writing is known for...Arnott masterfully explores masculinity, brotherhood and familial love...Limberlost is another astonishing book from one of Australia's most electrifying young authors." - Books+Publishing

"A storyteller whose tales always tremble on the edge of the mythic and legendary... He writes beautifully." - Thomas Keneally, author of The Dickens Boy

"Daring, atmospheric...The novel moves at a quicksilver pace, shimmering with menace and electric visions of forests and lake-filled valleys." - New York Times on The Rain Heron

"Arnott's eco-fable, set in a politically broken near future, explores the constant push-pull that exists between our capacity for enchantment and our need to exploit what we find...It's sad and satisfying." - The Times on The Rain Heron

"A dazzlingly visual novel...This is the visuality of myth, in which images are important not for their beauty or grandeur but for their resonance, their power to encapsulate deep truths more fully and potently than any amount of exposition ever could...It's a powerful story, beautifully rendered...The Rain Heron is a new story about learning to heed the old stories." - Los Angeles Review of Books on The Rain Heron

"Arnott's writing is clear and compelling, particularly in descriptions of the folkloric bird, with its rain-smeared transparency'." - New Yorker on The Rain Heron

"Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's visceral The Road, an air of savage solitude infuses Arnott's lyrically atmospheric post-apocalyptic novel, where trauma and resilience are connected to memory and the loss of both self and surroundings." - Booklist on The Rain Heron

"Vibrant and violent...Arnott fascinates with fable-like stories and thoughtful meditations...Beautiful imagery and magical moments." - Publishers Weekly on The Rain Heron

"Superb descriptions of nature and weather, of human emotion and animal instinct...evoke a landscape that is both startlingly immediate and mysteriously otherworldly: the perfect setting for a tense narrative of eco-disaster and fragile endurance. At once an urgent thriller and an elegiac fable, this mesmerizing tale is as lyrical as it is suspenseful." - Kirkus on The Rain Heron

"Astonishing...With the intensity of a perfect balance between the mythic and the real, The Rain Heron keeps turning and twisting, taking you to unexpected places. A deeply emotional and satisfying read. Beautifully written." - Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, on The Rain Heron

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