Winner, Age Book of the Year, 2021

Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2021

Shortlisted, ALS Gold Medal, 2021

Shortlisted, Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year, 2021

Longlisted, Not the Booker, United Kingdom, 2020

‘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

‘Daring, atmospheric…The novel moves at a quicksilver pace, shimmering with menace and electric visions of forests and lake-filled valleys.’ New York Times

‘Superb descriptions of nature and weather, of human emotion and animal instinct…evoke a landscape that is both startlingly immediate and mysteriously otherworldly: the perfect setting for a tense narrative of eco-disaster and fragile endurance. At once an urgent thriller and an elegiac fable, this mesmerizing tale is as lyrical as it is suspenseful.’ Kirkus

Robbie Arnott’s second novel is torrential; a force of allegory and myth. It flows like a river; immersive, elusive, totally original.