Dirt Town

Hayley Scrivenor

Bolinda/Macmillan Australia

Dirt Creek: A Novel

Flatiron Books

<p>My best friend wore her name, Esther, like a queen wearing her crown at a jaunty angle. We were twelve years old when she went missing.\nOn a sweltering Friday afternoon in Durton, best friends Ronnie and Esther leave school together. Esther never makes it home.\nRonnie's going to find her, she has a plan. Lewis will help. Their friend can't be gone, Ronnie won't believe it.\nDetective Sergeant Sarah Michaels can believe it, she has seen what people are capable of. She knows more than anyone how, in a moment of weakness, a person can be driven to do something they never thought possible.\nLewis can believe it too. But he can't reveal what he saw that afternoon at the creek without exposing his own secret.\nFive days later, Esther's buried body is discovered.\nWhat do we owe the girl who isn't there?\nCharacter-rich and propulsive, with a breathtakingly original use of voice and revolving points of view, Hayley Scrivenor delves under the surface, where no one can hide. With emotional depth and sensitivity, this stunning debut shows us how much each person matters in a community that is at once falling apart and coming together.\nEsther will always be a Dirt Town child, as we are its children, still.</p>

Dirt Town: Winner of the CWA New Blood Dagger 2023

Pan/Macmillan

<p>When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins her investigation, Esther’s tenacious best friend, Ronnie, is determined to find Esther and bring her home.\nWhen schoolfriend Lewis tells Ronnie that he saw Esther with a strange man at the creek the afternoon she went missing, Ronnie feels she is one step closer to finding her. But why is Lewis refusing to speak to the police? And who else is lying about how much they know about what has happened to Esther?\nPunctuated by a Greek chorus, which gives voice to the remaining children of the small, dying town, this novel explores the ties that bind, what we try and leave behind us, and what we can never outrun, while never losing sight of the question of what happened to Esther, and what her loss does to a whole town.\nIn Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together.</p>

Girl Falling

Macmillan,Australia

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Pan Macmillan/Australia

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Books by Hayley Scrivenor