Cirrus@Austlit

'Set in an unnamed country that has recently undergone a violent coup, Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is a novel of a land suffused with wild animal magic: a heron that can create vast storms; a species of squid whose ink has miraculous properties and must be harvested through sanguine ritual. Ren, seeking to escape the world, has for the past half-decade made her home in a small, wild corner of this place. Soon, though, her isolation is disturbed by a group of soldiers led by the charismatic and ruthless Lieutenant Harker. The soldiers are on a search for a rain heron, thought by many to be a myth. Harker, sensing that Ren knows more than she’s letting on, begins a campaign of terror; her coercion of Ren takes the form of strategic despoliation of the wilderness – Ren’s home. Ren is shocked by the soldier’s callousness: “Ren had seen the way she stalked around the mountain, unmoved by the trees, the air, the staggering slopes and the cellophane streams, the huge and harsh beauty of it all. For Harker, the mountain was no different to a car park, an office, the bottom of the ocean; she would use it, take what she needed, burn it down, dance gracefully in the ashes and never think of it again.”' (Introduction)