Winner Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2016
Shortlisted Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2018
Shortlisted NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2016
Shortlisted The Stella Prize 2016
Shortlisted The Australian Book Industry Awards 2016
Shortlisted The Voss Literary Prize 2016
Longlisted International Dublin Literary Award 2016
Longlisted The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2016
…a revelation, a masterly story involving the refuge of silence, the fate of bees, and the shadows of old sins.
Alberto Manguel, Books of the Year 2015, Australian Book Review
It has been six months since Tess Müller stopped speaking. Her silence is baffling to her parents, her teachers and her younger sister, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning home wet, muddy and disheveled.Their father, struggling with his own losses, tends to his apiary and tries to understand why his bees are disappearing. But after he discovers a car wreck and human remains on their farm, old secrets emerge to threaten the fragile family.One day Tess’s teacher Jim encounters Evangeline by the wild Repentance River. Jim is in flight from his own troubles in Sydney, and Evangeline, raised in a mountain commune and bearing the scars of the fire that destroyed it, is a puzzle he longs to solve.
As the rainforest trees are felled and the lakes fill with run-off from the expanding mines, Tess watches the landscape of her family undergo shifts of its own.
Atmospheric, elegiac and gripping, The World Without Us, is a story of secrets and survival, family and community, loss and renewal.
Published by Bloomsbury Australia (2015), UK and US (2016).
Mireille interviewed on RRRFM’s Multi-Storied.
Mireille answers Booktopia’s 10 questions.
Podcast from interview at Outspoken, Maleny, with Steven Lang.
Order from Bloomsbury.
Order audiobook from Audible.
…a bright, bracing marvel of a book…[Juchau’s] prose, too, is a marvel of balance: witty and sensual, self-aware but not jaded, and capable of making poetry from anything…
Geordie Williamson, The Australian