THE RAIN HERON

Following a coup in an unnamed country and a mysterious weather disruption, a fugitive woman and the military officer pursuing her find their fates converging in the search for a mythical bird who can either rescue or destroy at will.

An unlucky farmer endures “six years of hungry, dismal failure” until an apocalyptic storm and the accompanying appearance of a spectral rain heron transform both the land and the farmer’s fortunes, earning her great wealth and bitter envy. Following a vengeful neighbor's attack on the bird—the farmer’s perceived protector—drought starves the fields, and the farmer, weakened by infection, is left for dead. We next meet her in the wilderness, where she has fled not only the country’s military coup, but also her own shadowy past. In the meantime, in a remote coastal village, a young girl and her aunt are part of a small, secretive community that uses human blood to lure squid into nets in order to extract the squid ink so highly prized by paint makers. But the arrival of an outsider obsessed with learning these squid-catching secrets breeds suspicion and, finally, violence. With blood on her hands—human, not aquatic—young Zoe disappears into the very different life of the army, thereby becoming an instrument of the coup (the details of which remain hazy). The stories of the two women, Ren the fugitive and Zoe her tormenter, become one when Zoe is ordered to find Ren and make her reveal the rain heron’s hiding place. Military generals presumably want to use the captured bird’s power to alter the seasons and who knows what else. Superb descriptions of nature and weather, of human emotion and animal instinct, by Australian novelist Arnott evoke a landscape that is both startlingly immediate and mysteriously otherworldly: the perfect setting for a tense narrative of eco-disaster and fragile endurance.

At once an urgent thriller and an elegiac fable, this mesmerizing tale is as lyrical as it is suspenseful.