Fireweather

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 STELLA PRIZE

It all began when they started running away . . .

Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad ...

In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona's head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being - one that might make whole her broken heart.



'Fireweather is a quietly radical novel about love, loss, and the wild wisdom of the non-human world. It arrives like a storm breaking after the stillness of heat, charged with something electric, elemental and beautifully unnerving. At once searing and tender, this sixth offering from the Oxford-educated, genre-defying writer and poet feels less like a traditional novel and more like a meditation - on heartbreak, perception and what might be waiting for us just outside the edges of human comprehension ... the book reveals itself as both a love story and a subversive philosophical inquiry ... Darling weaves poetry, ecology, philosophy and quiet rage into a narrative that reads like Clarice Lispector in a climate crisis. It's darkly funny, often devastating, and paradigm-shifting.'
-Viola Raikhel, The New York Times Style Magazine- Australia

'Darling writes feminist fiction infused with wit, intertextuality and a poetic command of language, creating a compelling, intricate internal voice that stands, too, as a critique of institutional misogyny in psychiatry.'
-Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald

'Against a backdrop of raging bushfires and devastating winds, we reunite with Darling's protagonist, Winona, from her previous book, Thunderhead ... Darling's sharp, stylised prose shimmers on the page and pulls the reader in deeply to this narrative of feminist rage. There is music in this book, there is deep time, there is philosophy, there is a river of tears.'
-Judges' comments from the 2026 Stella Prize