Jane Harper’s The Dry wins Indie book of year, Reese Witherspoon gets film rights

After Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon’s production company have their eyes on another Australian book.

Jane Harper’s debut novel has been voted book of the year. Oicture: David Geraghty

Jane Harper lives not far from the water at Melbourne’s St Kilda. Her hit debut novel is set in the same state but another world: a drought-ravaged rural community, where for some desperate farmers “the wrong end of a gun might look like the right answer”.

Harper’s The Dry yesterday won the $4000 book of the year prize at the Indie Awards, voted by independent booksellers. Previous winners ­include Tim Winton, Anna Funder, Charlotte Wood and Richard Flanagan.

Reese Witherspoon. Picture: Getty

The novel, published by Pan Macmillan last May, has since been sold to 20 international publishers. Film rights have been ­optioned by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, which is ­behind another television series based on an Australian novel, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies.

It’s not a bad result for a book the first-time author thought would be just a practice run. She had worked as a journalist in ­Britain and Australia and was daunted, for starters, by the fact a novel was much longer than a newspaper story.

“It’s all been so unexpected. I started writing the book because I always thought I wanted to write a novel but never did,” Harper said. “My main goal was just to get it finished. It seemed like a huge task — so many words! So I thought I’d treat it as a learning exercise, and maybe write a better one next time.”

Another unusual aspect of this novel set in rural Victoria, in “the crushing vastness of the open land”, is that its author was born in Manchester. She came to Australia with her parents at eight, ­returned home as a teen and completed schooling and university before moving back to Australia in 2008. She has not lived a rural life, but has met people who do through her work as a journalist on the Geelong Advertiser and, back home at the Hull Daily Mail. “It was the first time I came across people whose lives were so tied up in things they could not control, especially the weather,” Harper said.

“There’s a sense of community, with all its light and shade, that is connected to place, any place. A lot of people from different places have said to me the book reminds them of how they grew up.”

The Dry opens with a harrowing crime. A farmer has shot dead his wife and six-year-old son and then turned the shotgun on himself. Melbourne-based federal police officer Aaron Falk, who left the town under a cloud as a teenager, returns for the funerals and becomes involved in the case.

And while Harper was slow to start as a novelist, she’s quick on the follow-up: a new novel, also featuring Aaron Falk, is due in October.

The other Indie Award winners, each receiving $1000, were Helen Garner in nonfiction for Everywhere I Look, Dominic Smith in fiction of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Cath Crowley in young adult for Words in Deep Blue and Jeannie Baker in children’s for Circle.