'The much-anticipated third novel by award-winning Australian author Robbie Arnott, Limberlost is a story of family and land, loss and hope, fate and the unknown, and love and kindness.
'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.
'The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.' (Publication summary)
Selected as one of the ABC Arts best books of 2022
'The award-winning writer is in fine form as he tackles the big themes of death, love and hope.'
'Robbie Arnott’s much-anticipated third novel, Limberlost, feels recognisably steeped in the writer’s usual literary preoccupations, with a couple of significant points of difference. Following 2018’s Flames and 2020’s The Rain Heron, Limberlost feels less self-consciously clever, less busy, less ambitious, but entirely more honest. If Arnott’s previous offerings have been a stage performance, Limberlost feels more like having a beer at the pub with a friend.' (Introduction)
'Limberlost opens with an image of nature as dangerous: a whale, reportedly driven mad or feral by a harpoon in its side, is alleged to be destroying fishing boats in a vengeful spree. Ned is five, and the whale stories haunt him so much that his father takes him out to see for himself. The frightened child waits in a small boat for the animal’s power to show itself.' (Introduction)
'Driving his young daughters home from school, Limberlost’s protagonist, Ned, stumbles through an accidental telling of an anecdote from childhood. The details, for which his children press him, suddenly feel distant, strange. Ned is struck for a moment by some fundamental grief, and wonders “if the troubled boy of that summer would recognise the man he’d become”.'(Introduction)
