Torched

An explosive, haunting and utterly compelling crime novel about mothers and sons and the ties that bind them.

A small Yarra Valley town has been devastated by a bushfire, and Reefton Primary School Principal Phoebe Warton can’t sleep. She’s the single mother of Caleb who is accused of starting the fire – on purpose. Twelve people are dead, students from her school among them; only a monster would cause such carnage. But where was her son that day? No one knows but Caleb, and he’s not talking.

Against mounting community rage, Phoebe sets out to clear her son. But every avenue leads back to Caleb. Why did he vanish from his Country Fire Authority shift? Who else was at the abandoned goldmine that day? Why is Caleb refusing to speak?

Phoebe will be forced to confront the nature of guilt and redemption, and decide what boundaries she is willing to cross to save the son she loves.

29 January 2020

Dear Reader,

As Torched goes to print, Australia faces what feels like a never-ending wave of firestorms threatening both country towns and major cities. The evening news is filled with images of burning coasts and mountainsides, with dangers faced by firefighters, defence force members, and ordinary Australians desperately attempting to save their homes. Again and again witnesses try to express the scale of what they’ve experienced, trauma so huge it stretches the facilities of English to describe. I wonder, what is a natural disaster? Have we changed the world so much that bushfires can no longer be described as natural? Can the flames that burned schools and dictionaries also have burned the meaning out of language? Maybe we need new words, and indeed scientists speculate that we stand at the dawn of a new geological era. Some have coined the term Anthropocene from a belief that we inhabit a new age, that the layers of sediment we will leave – equivalent to ash from the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs – will be agricultural and industrial and nuclear and plastic evidence of humanity, with all our ingenuity and carelessness.

Writing and editing this manuscript has been complicated for me by a recent health scare of my own. I’m waiting for pathology results while brown rain falls outside, trying to avoid feeling like the damaged piece of a damaged whole, myself part of the great helplessness of a planet sighing in distress. We’re seeing what happens if we treat Earth as though her health doesn’t matter. I’m a high school teacher as well as a writer. I see students frustrated that the power to make a change resides in the hands of people scared to use it. Political arguments attempt to drown the science. Bushfires seem unpredictable, but that they would happen was not. Students say they feel helpless, that choices about what they can do are limited in scope and usefulness. I hear them describe these fires, and the continuing unwillingness to prevent further climate change, as evidence of democracy not working. But everyone can do something. Writers still write out of a belief that stories can still achieve something. Fiction shows us the world according to other people. Studies have shown that literature makes people more empathetic. I’m presenting a story, an intimate story about the relationship between a parent and a child. Family members, individuals who – like each individual reader – have to find a way to cope with the magnitude of the results of collective action and inaction. Every life is a story. Maybe something we say can encourage some change. Maybe those changes will add up to enough.