The Cane is the award-winning non-fiction author Maryrose Cuskelly’s first leap into fiction, and we are all the beneficiaries. Reminiscent of Jane Harper’s The Dry and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands, The Cane is similarly set in a small Australian rural town where an unsolved crime turns the community upside down.
Maryrose Cuskelly
It’s the 1970s and it doesn’t take much to create outrage and scandal – like a new suspiciously anti-establishment teacher at the local high school giving students copies of the banned Little Red Book.
Sixteen-year-old Janet McClymont disappears without a trace, while her handbag and contents are left strewn in the cane fields. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Or did she simply run away to Brisbane? After two months, the residents of Quala can think of nothing else and continue to search for clues of her whereabouts while police investigate all leads, including the decade-old death of another teenage girl which may or may not be related.
This is an evocatively written, atmospheric novel of landscape and of rural town life where everyone knows each other’s business. One can feel the humidity and searing heat of far north Queensland, its isolation and uniqueness. As we are introduced to the plethora of townsfolk, potential suspects and subplots, the story’s pace quickens and tensions rise, particularly as we reach the denouement when the cane fields are burnt for harvesting. The action on multiple fronts becomes enjoyably palpable.
—The Cane by Maryrose Cuskelly (Allen & Unwin) is out on the 1st of February.
The Cane
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Quala, a North Queensland sugar town, the 1970s. Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned.
Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence, a schoolteacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind Quala that the past is always present...
Bestsellers: Scott Pape and Ash Barty continue to prove a hit with readers! 
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