OUTBACK WITH A BANG!

Jane Harper hit the jackpot with her debut novel, The Dry, set in rural Australia. So she’s done it again...

Jane Harper is, unusually, almost lost for words. ‘Finding out that Reese Witherspoon had read my book was just… amazing,’ says the most exciting emerging novelist of the past 12 months. Not only did Witherspoon read The Dry, Harper’s debut novel, which has sold in the hundreds of thousands since its publication last year, but the actor’s production company – the brains behind Gone Girl – quickly snapped up the film rights.

‘I’m reluctant to count my chickens until I’m sitting in the cinema watching it, but it’s really exciting,’ says Harper. ‘I’d love to see it made into a movie.’

The extraordinary success of The Dry gives hope to all aspiring writers. Three years ago, Harper was a jobbing journalist harbouring a dream to write fiction. Seeking motivation, she enrolled in a 12-week online novel-writing course – and struck gold with her very first attempt.

‘I always had an ambition to write a book, but I’d never managed to do much about it,’ says Harper, 37, from her home in Melbourne. ‘I never could quite understand how people put all their ideas and words in order and made a compelling story. I’d worked full-time in print since leaving university, so I was used to producing under pressure. It got to the point that I realised the best way would be to get a little bit of extra focus. I work better to deadlines.’

When she signed up to the writing course, Harper ‘had a vague idea that I wanted to write something set in Australia, set around a remote community’. From those humble beginnings came The Dry, in which a shocking crime committed in a parched outback town brings buried secrets to the surface, implicating the investigating detective, Aaron Falk.

Where did the idea come from? ‘In my work in newspapers I was dealing with farming communities in isolated pockets,’ she says. ‘I drew heavily on their stories and what affected them. The way the environment impacted on the characters became a key component. The weather and landscape are such distinct parts of Australia, and so integral to people’s lifestyles and relationships. It does you a lot of favours as a writer. It’s such an atmospheric country and it helps with that aura of mystery and suspense.’

Born and raised in Manchester, she moved to Australia with her family when she was eight, living outside Melbourne and taking dual nationality. Her family returned to England when she was 14, and Harper completed her schooling and studied at the University of Kent before working as a journalist in Hampshire and North Yorkshire.

In 2008, aged 28, she went back to Australia, intending to travel ‘for a couple of years. Nearly ten years later, I’m still here’. Harper is married to an Australian, with whom she has a one-year-old son. ‘My family still lives in England, I have good friends there and go back regularly, but I identify very closely with Australia.’

Her new novel, Force Of Nature, once again pitches the enigmatic Aaron Falk – ‘there’s definitely more to see from him’ – into a world where secrets unravel in a hostile landscape. As gripping, atmospheric and ingeniously plotted as The Dry, it places Harper in the elevated company of the authors she most admires: Val McDermid, Gillian Flynn and Lee Child.

The Dry, she says, has ‘changed my life’. The only aspect she isn’t entirely comfortable with is the recognition, and she avoids reading reviews where possible. ‘I definitely don’t seek them out. I try to write books that I would like to read. That’s my only yardstick.’ If Hollywood A-listers also get a kick – and a film – out of them, so much the better.

Force Of Nature is published by Little, Brown .

BY GRAEME THOMSON ‘Australia is so atmospheric – it helps with that aura of mystery’