Kieran Elliott is back to visit his home town for the first time in years. With his partner Mia and their new baby Audrey in tow, he went home to visit his parents and the small Tasmanian town he left behind. He left behind the secrets. He left behind the mistake he made that changed his family forever. And he left behind the brother he lost to the sea.
Almost immediately, Kieran is thrown into all the old feelings, all the old shame, and all the old mysteries that his hometown brings. The body of a young woman, an artist, is found on the beach. Kieran and Mia had just met her, as she was the roommate of an old friend, Olivia. Kieran, and everyone else in town, can’t help but draw parallels between this murder and the disappearance of a teenage girl back about twelve years earlier.
That day that Gabby had gone missing was a day Kieran can never forget. A storm had blown in, the worst in decades. He had been in the caves with his then-girlfriend Olivia when the water started rising quickly, too quickly, trapping him in a part of the caves he didn’t think he could get out from. Olivia had made it to higher ground, but Kieran hadn’t made it. He had called his brother Finn for help, and Finn and his friend Toby had taken their boat to the caves to try to get to Kieran. In a sad twist of fate, the water rose and drew Kieran out of the cave but caused a terrible accident with the boat, and both Finn and Toby were killed.
Kieran, unable to forgive himself for the death of his brother, left his home to try to get away from his guilt.
Now he’s back to help his parents move, but this new crime opens up the entire town’s wounds all over again, including Kieran’s. As the police investigate, quietly making inquiries and lining up evidence, Kieran’s need for resolution leads him to look into the crime as well, and what he learns changes everything he knew about that day, about his mistake of staying too long in the caves and his brother’s subsequent death, about his hometown, and ultimately about himself.
Jane Harper’s The Survivors is an atmospheric slow burn thriller about long-buried secrets and dealing with grief and shame. Like the ocean off the coast of Tasmania, where part of the action takes place, The Survivors is dark and deep, drawing you in slowly until you realize you just can’t get away from this story. With deft plotting, intense characters, powerful emotions, and big surprises.
I was able to listen to the audio book, and narrator Stephen Shanahan brings the perfect tone to this novel. His Aussie accent is thick, so if you’re like me and not used to it, it make take a few chapters to adjust. But once I learned his rhythms, I thought he was the ideal narrator to add gravitas and depth to the emotional story underlying Kieran’s journey home.
I struggled at first to engage with this story. The beginning is a little slow, which ends up working well with the overall mood of the story, but it does take a while to appreciate that about The Survivors. But the more I listened, the more I was drawn in, and the more I was drawn in, the more I wanted to spend time in this somber story, feeling the darkness as it enveloped me and then released me. I wouldn’t call this a feel-good book, but there is an honesty to it, to this journey through grief, that is powerful and prescient and can bring a sense of peace to your life as the story wraps itself up. We’re all survivors of something in this life, and reading (or listening to) The Survivors can help you remember and celebrate that, and that is a good thing.
A copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
