The Rain Heron Read online

  Something had happened to my throat. My breaths were coming out shallow and wrong. His beard scratched my ear, which was hot. So, I realised, was my face. I couldn’t hold my thoughts straight. My phantom eye flinched from a far-off breeze, but I barely noticed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to everyone at Text Publishing, especially my editor, David Winter. Thanks also to James Roxburgh, Emily Bell, Ben Walter, Scott Arnott, and the great love of my life, Emily Bill.

  Robbie Arnott was a 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist and won the Margaret Scott Prize in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. His widely acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), 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 Not the Booker Prize. He lives in Hobart.

  @RobbieArnott

  Praise for

  THE RAIN HERON

  ‘The Rain Heron is genuinely and completely magnificent—a magical thing.’

  Robert Lukins

  ‘Robbie Arnott imagines a thoroughly strange, inky-dark land of the near future. Sharp and original, The Rain Heron is a beautiful novel about love, violence and redemption.’

  Laura Elvery

  ‘A journey into a perilous world where the horror of human greed collides with the eloquence of nature.’

  Leah Kaminsky

  ‘In The Rain Heron, Robbie Arnott has turned his gaze to civilisation’s need to control and understand the natural world. This is a book full of heart—it’s so richly imagined, inventive and beautifully written, with a strong message, but is never didactic. It’s like nothing I’ve read and Arnott has quickly become one of my favourite authors.’

  J. P. Pomare

  ‘The Rain Heron is an intoxicating fable from an extraordinary imagination. Robbie Arnott writes like the words want to be his.’

  Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Robbie Arnott is singlehandedly reinventing Australian literature. The Rain Heron is a soaring feat of the imagination.’

  Bram Presser

  ‘With its emotional power and rich symbolism, The Rain Heron is an immersion in landscape, climate and an animal world that lives despite us, not for us. Robbie Arnott has imagined a creature, by turns exquisitely beautiful and terrifying, the likes of which I have never seen in Australian literature. His titular heron is a source of breathless wonder, of reverence. Arnott is just as wise with his human characters, with their wretchedness and elation, love and mistrust. There are images in this book that are entirely new to me, and I will cherish them.’

  Jock Serong

  ‘The Rain Heron is exquisite. Reading it feels like hearing a legend from our past, from our near future; like remembering something you had always known but somehow forgotten. It is both fantastical and deeply true.’

  Jane Rawson

  ‘The Rain Heron is a beautifully told story in four parts, in which the line between reality and myth is impossible to draw. As in his debut novel, Flames, Robbie Arnott writes characters—human and animal alike—that you invest in rapidly, making the twists and turns in their stories feel that much more personal and at times shocking…Arnott expertly navigates the fraught relationships between humans and the natural world, and paints shades of grey into moments that for a lesser writer would be purely black and white. This is a book that is not only a compelling, original read, but one that delivers hard truths that urgently need to be heard.’

  Elizabeth Flux, Books+Publishing

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Robbie Arnott, 2020

  The moral right of Robbie Arnott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2020

  Cover design by Chong W.H.

  Cover image from iStock

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  ISBN: 9781922268778 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925923315 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.