Floyd and Iris are siblings bound by their past. Outcasts, they, among many, are hunting for the puma, Dusk, who has been responsible for the deaths of both humans and animals. If they find her, they will win the bounty placed on Dusk's head. As they wander the highlands, they find much more than Dusk.
Did I enjoy this one - I'm still not sure! I loved the beautifully poetic descriptions of their journey but they did little to drive the plot forward. I did however love the very fitting end. Am I glad I read it - definitely, yes!

Wow.
Wow but 4 stars and not 5? Allow me to explain.
Arnott’s books have been on my radar for some time.
His craft for creating atmosphere and characters’ psyche is incredible.
5/5 for his writing.
And thanks to that, I never felt bored despite being slightly less engaged with the plot and the characters at times.
Iris and Floyd are twins who have an unfortunate start to life.
They go after Dusk and things change for them.
The parts after they decide to hunt Dusk were gripping and thrilling.
Plot and characterisation 4/5 stars

Robbie Arnott’ debut “Flames” I described as a Tasmanian Fusion of Fantasy, Folklore, Flora and Fauna and featured a variety of styles: starting as magic realism but diverting via folklore, sea-hunting, detective film-noir, some slightly misjudged humour before getting stuck in fantasy/myth.

I did not read his second “Rain Heron” but believe it was an eco-fable involving a hunt for the titular part-mythical animal.

His third “Limberlost” was a quieter, less fantastical novel – perhaps more an examination of personal myths, at times beautifully written I did wonder if the evocatively captured Tasmanian flora, fauna and landscape did a little too much of the heavy lifting.

This, his fourth novel, published in 2024 in Australia and on the day I read it the winner of the 2025 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Literary Fiction Book of the Year, is due out in the UK in August – and it draws on many of the signature elements of his previous novels:

A Tasmanian setting (although very deliberately here there is no explicit naming of either time or overall setting);

Beautiful natural descriptions – here the awe-inspiring highland landscapes take precedence over the more rarefied flora and fauna;

The hunt for a mythical titular beast – here a legendary puma, the last of its kind having been bought in from the Andes to cull the equally non-indigenous deer but having got out of control and now largely hunted to extinction other than this one deadly remnant

The use of myth more generally – here in a landscape strewn (in what seems a clear metaphor both for the historical displacement of the first people and the on-going extinction of the natural world due to climate change and other anthropic actions) with giant bones – some of which are repurposes for shelters or even in one case an inn.

The use of different styles - here there is a heavy draw on the Western/frontier movie starting with frontier towns and wary contact with the remaining first people but then moving very much into adventure tropes.

The basic set up is of two 37 year old twins – Iris and Floyd Renshaw (the story told very much from Iris’s point of view apart from one deliberately jarring section from Floyd’s viewpoint) who leave their normal coastal haunts for the highland due to the story of the puma, and more particularly the bounty available for those who succeed in catching it (many hunters having already died in the attempt).

Of Iris and Floyd we are first told “Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and even that was debated. Depending on who you asked, they were labourers, hunters, thieves or worse. Or just travellers. There was always somewhere they were travelling through and never anywhere they stayed long.” but it becomes quickly clear that at least to those with long memories the Renshaw surname “the simplest kind of curse … a trap stretched open for a lifetime, a barbed gift delivered at birth” carries a resonance due to their convict-turned-escapees-turned-criminals and murderer parents.

On their trails Iris (and Floyd – whose twisted back stems from an incident in his past and causes him recurring agony) encounter or pursue among others: a legendary puma-hunter imported from Patagonia; Patrick Lees – an enigmatic tracker who Iris finds herself drawn to and who Floyd distrusts; a rich farmer devastated at the loss of his son to Dusk; a village of first person peat-diggers (I think based on the Palawa people) – but also the mixed memories of their parents (whose cruelty, drinking and criminality was undercut by a sense of us-against-the-world togetherness which Iris and Floyd themselves model in turn).

One area I particularly enjoyed was Iris and Floyd’s interior vulnerability which is at times at odds with their itinerant self-sufficient lifestyle and which particularly comes out in their surprising emotional attachments to their horses – passages such as “They tethered their horses in the small stable, unsaddled them, brushed them down, gave them each a blanket, held handfuls of oats to their mouths, threw hay into their stalls, filled their troughs with water, patted their noses, scratched and stroked the thinly furred tissue of their ears, leaned into the huff of their breath to whisper wordless love. Then they straightened their coats and hats and went inside.” particularly resonated with me given my own equine-attachments.

And overall there is a lot to enjoy in the slow build up to the novel, but its more dramatic denouement (despite an innovative use of the page to capture a hiatus) was not really to my tastes compared to the more subtle “Limberlost”. Nevertheless Arnott remains a distinctive talent.

Iris and Floyd are the children of parents transported from the old country for poaching. The Renshaw name is still a byword for thievery and violence despite the twins’ best efforts. With no work on the horizon, Iris suggests they head to the highlands after hearing about a puma killing sheep and now humans. Travelling through a starkly beautiful landscape, they find a tavern, oddly enclosed with the bones of what might be a whale from when the plateau and mountains were submerged, where there’s much talk of the Patagonian who left over a month ago, now presumed dead. Iris finds herself smitten with one of the hunters with whom she and Floyd reluctantly decide to combine forces. Their quest will end in a way neither could ever have imagined.
As with his previous novels, Robbie Arnott’s writing is anchored in the natural world but he knows how to spin a compelling story, too. The magnificent landscape through which Iris and Floyd travel is gorgeously described in vivid word pictures. As they follow Dusk’s trail, the twins’ backstories are sketched in for us – the childhood stealing for their parents addled by drink, rare kindnesses remembered, the reputation that no amount of honest hard work can expunge. A strikingly beautiful novel from a writer who's become a favourite of mine.

The best book I've read so far this year. Atmospheric, thrilling and vivid. It has great characters, an excellent story and I was hooked from the start. Couldn't put it down and can't wait to see it published.