'Books When Jane Harper put her debut novel up for an award she hoped for feedback, but she won, and scored a film deal. First-time authors often talk about the “journey” of writing their debut novel. Frequently it involves a love of story-telling as a child, endless journal writing, pages and pages of short stories, first drafts and the seemingly never-ending struggle of getting noticed by a publisher.None of that is the experience of Jane Harper, whose first novel, The Dry, is released on Wednesday.'