Winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Shortlisted for the Stella Prize, Adelaide Festival Literary Awards, ABIA Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Voss Literary Prize. Listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2016.
It’s six months since Tess Müller stopped speaking. Her silence confounds her parents, her teachers and her younger sister Meg, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning muddy and dishevelled. Their father is struggling to understand why his bees are disappearing. After he discovers a car wreck and human remains on their farm, the past begins to unravel the present. One day Tess’s teacher Jim finds Evangeline by the wild Repentance River. Jim is avoiding his own troubles in Sydney, and Evangeline, raised in a commune and scarred from the fire that destroyed it, is a puzzle he intends to solve.
Atmospheric, elegiac and gripping, The World Without Us explores the effects of our rapidly changing environments on our inner lives.
…has all the pace and invention of the classic thriller. What makes it unforgettable is Juchau’s sensitive portrayal of a family poleaxed by grief.
—Kate Saunders, The Times, UK
Juchau’s style is perfectly poised, elegant and restrained. Almost any page of this astonishing novel offers proof of a writer of great poetic power…an extraordinarily vivid novel, elegant, convincing, intelligent and profoundly moving.
—Alberto Manguel, The Guardian
