THE DROWNING GIRLS
She’ll grab you by the ankles and hold you under until you sink…
Nate can’t believe he’s dragged himself up to this backwater town. Port Flinders would have fallen off the map years ago, except for one thing. Tourists flock to its mangrove-lined shores for the annual Drowning Girl festival: sacrifice a girl at sea, and the fishing hauls that keep the town afloat will prosper, don’t and the whole town will sink.
But it’s just a legend, a gimmick. Everybody knows that.
Don’t they?
WINNER OF THE
2021 BANJO PRIZE
“A fantastic new voice in
Australian fiction.”
THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
THE WHISPERING
The whispering wild will take your child if you dare to look away…
Callum Haffenden swears he’ll never return to Granite Creek. But, thirty years after a life-shattering accident, he’s thrust back into the clutches of far north Queensland and a local legend he’s worked hard to forget.
While searching for answers about the death of a local man, the truth of a decades-old mystery of two missing girls surfaces, and suspects begin to pile up.
With an urge to protect his teenage daughter, Callum battles The Whispering burrowing into his ears and fights to resist the lure of the rainforest. After all, everyone knows that the worst things in the rainforest are those unseen.
REVIEWS FOR THE WHISPERING
'The Whispering has everything we've come to expect from Australian rural noir in the way of climate and landscape, characters, hidden truths, and unpredictable plotting. Lando has cleverly woven an intricate and multi-layered story into a gripping mystery told with skill - and a good dose of obligatory treachery! I devoured it.'
Lyn Yeowart, author of The Silent Listener
'Small town secrets and decades-old animosities weave together in this atmospheric, eerie mystery set in the dense tropical north, where everyone has something to hide and the dank wet rainforest can lure away the unwary. A dark, absorbing, tangled mystery that had me second-guessing right to the end.'
Dinuka McKenzie, author of The Torrent
ABOUT ME
I grew up above my parents’ Melbourne bookshop surrounded by other people’s stories, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one of my own.
In 2021, my then unpublished manuscript of The Whispering won the HarperCollins Banjo Prize for fiction and I landed my first book deal. Since then, I’ve gone on to sign a further two book deal.
My second book, The Drowning Girls, will be available in July 2023 with a third out in 2024.
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