The Drowning Girls (Veronica Lando, HarperCollins)

As the summer holidays draw to a close, disgraced teacher Nate Bass arrives in an impoverished northern Queensland fishing town, begrudgingly ready for a job teaching all of Port Flinders’ 17 primary school students. The town struggles all year, but for the annual Drowning Girl festival: a week-long celebration that culminates in the ceremonial lowering into the ocean of a statue as sacrifice for a good year of fishing. Around here, however, the sacrifice hasn’t always been purely symbolic, and when the body of a woman washes up days before the event, Nate is surprised by how unperturbed the town seems—that is, until the identity of the victim sends shockwaves throughout a community still holding onto a 25-year-old tragedy. As Nate moves into the caravan park and befriends Irena, a tourist who arrived last year and stayed to document the festival’s unnerving history, the truth of what happened all those years earlier slowly unravels. Here, there are old secrets, long-held grudges and memories as slippery as the mangrove trunks that loom dangerous at the town’s edge. In The Drowning Girls, Veronica Lando, Banjo Prize winner for her first book, The Whispering, grips and holds the reader underwater—the characters’ nightmares of the drowning girl are palpable and the story is claustrophobic, despite the vast ocean nearby. This novel is for readers who love to delve into Sarah Bailey or Chris Hammer’s mysterious, complicated histories, or swelter in Candice Fox’s oppressive Queensland heat.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Fiona Hardy is a children’s author and a bookseller at Readings. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews