Showing results by author "Chloe Hooper" in All Categories

The Arsonist takes listeners inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made homeless. Here, in the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria's electricity is generated, and the rates of unemployment, crime and domestic abuse are the highest in the state, more than 30 people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know.

When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss?

In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-90s, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student. As the young teacher's sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover's wife, has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime book about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress some years before, set in a nearby town.

From Chloe Hooper, author of the phenomenal The Tall Man, comes a brilliant novel about sex and money. The Engagement is a taut psychological thriller in which the deft blurring of reality and dark fantasy rivals that of Luis Bunuel's classic Belle de Jour. Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: to stay with Alexander Colquhoun, the well-mannered heir of a pastoral dynasty, at his property in western Victoria. Liese, an English architect in flight from the financial crisis, now works at her uncle's real-estate business in Melbourne.