Showing results by author "Chloe Hooper" in All Categories

On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were 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. The Arsonist takes listeners on the hunt for this man and inside the strange puzzle of his mind.

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.

When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, they have to find a way to tell their two young sons. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? What practical lessons does children’s literature – with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals – teach about grief and resilience in real life? As Hooper discovers, 'the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future'.

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.