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.
LIMBERLOST
by Robbie Arnott
Text Publishing, October 2022
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.
Robbie Arnott’s acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Not the Booker Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. He lives in Hobart, Australia.

On the cusp of thirty, Coral learns that a thing is growing inside her body. It is not necessarily a complete disaster, she tells herself. I’m okay, she tells herself. Soon the thing inside her is the size of a plum. ‘Little Plum,’ she says, ‘Little Plum, I love you.’ And she wants to love it, the little plum. It’s just that she can’t yet think of it as what it is becoming: a baby, and not just a fruity morsel.
Its name means giant tooth but everything about it is gigantic, including its pull on the human imagination. Tim and Emma Flannery’s BIG MEG
How he wished to paint it. The razed city. The human drama. He saw the old forms broken, shaped in new alignments, the destructible world abstracted in splendid innovations…Already he understood the power of derangement, and how a single window might contain an entire fate.
Sibyl loves possibilities, and at the Grand Mirror Hotel everything seems possible. It might even be possible that one day her grandmother will let her open the Book of Advanced and Dangerous Magic. Sibyl is the apprentice hotel witch. Under the watchful care of her grandmother she is memorising spell patterns to keep the hotel staff and guests happy. But the spells don’t always go exactly as planned: sometimes the spell to make the cakes rise works a little too well, and eclairs and chocolate cakes float up to the ceiling.