WINNER - 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction

WINNER - 2025 Story Prize

SHORTLISTED - 2025 NSW Literary Awards

SHORTLISTED - 2025 Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction Book of the Year


SHORTLISTED - 2025 Age Book of the Year Fiction Award

'Every one of them was a whole world, full of love and curiosity, and every one of these worlds touched hundreds of others.'

A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further - into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer's home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The Night Guest comes a captivating account of loss and fear, and their extended echoes in individual lives.