2023/019: The Survivors — Jane Harper

The Survivors were gone. Where they should have been standing solid and secure with their heads always rising above the water, there was only angry ocean and a grey-black horizon. They were fully submerged, swallowed whole by the swell. [p. 92]

Kieran Elliott left the small Tasmanian town of Evelyn Bay twelve years ago, after the worst storm in eighty years killed his brother Finn and Finn's friend Toby. Kieran's been blaming himself ever since: the two wouldn't have been out in their boat if he hadn't been stranded on the cliffs, looking out over the ocean to where the Survivors -- three life-sized iron figures, a memorial to a century-old shipwreck -- were fully submerged. Now Kieran, with his partner Mia and their baby daughter, has returned to Evelyn Bay to help his mother pack up the house: his dad has dementia and needs residential care. Mia's also a native, and her best friend Gabby disappeared without trace on the day of that storm. Is it coincidence that the day after they meet up with their old friends -- Sean, Ash, Olivia -- a young female artist is found dead on the beach?

There are many layers to this novel, and the slow reveal of the events during the storm is not the most interesting. There's a story about friendship, especially between young men ('they can be dickheads sometimes, but I’m not like them,’ says Kieran: Olivia frowns, and tells him yes he is); a story about a writer trying to piece together a set of facts; a story about a bereaved mother trying to prove that her daughter's rucksack couldn't have washed up on a particular stretch of beach; a story about a father no longer able to distinguish his dead son from his living son. And, fortunately, a story about the resolution of an old and painful mystery. But to me, the most interesting aspect was the small-town society and the ways in which everyone knows, and retells, the same stories: the ways you can't really leave, and can't really return.

I have several of Jane Harper's novels, but this is the first I've read. I liked the measured pace and the atmosphere, and the descriptions of sea and shore. I'll get around to the others some time soon!

Fulfils the ‘Set in Australia’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.