“First she spotted the birds. Pulses of feathered texture in the nearest stand of trees: silvereyes, grey wrens, flame-chested robins. Clawed onto the upper branches was a gang of black cockatoos, ripping seed cones apart with the curved blades of their beaks, their yellow tail feathers flashing with the work. High above them all floated a pair of eagles, dark as death, arcing serenely through the weak clouds.”

Dusk is the fourth novel by award-wining Australian author, Robbie Arnott. Thirty-seven-year-old twins, Iris and Floyd Renshaw, out of work, low on cash, and mostly unwelcome in the lowlands, are headed up to the highland plains. They have heard there’s a bounty on the puma that’s up there killing sheep, shepherds and anyone hunting for her, even a certain Patagonian professional. Not that they have experience, much of a plan, or a suitable weapon. And Floyd’s physical condition can be variable.

But when they arrive, Iris feels an immediate connection with the highlands. “Instead of harshness or bleakness she felt a freeing, lung-emptying openness that bounced off the hard stone, that waved through the thick mounds of tufted grass, threaded through the gnarled trees, fell down the chalky textures of the small tors she and Floyd rode below. That lived most of all in the tarns that appeared without warning, rising through the rock, pooling in her peripheries, dark and glossy and mirror-like.”

Encounters and incidents during their journey bring to mind a somewhat troubled childhood with their escaped-convict parents, whose care could be erratic, whose notorious reputation tainted the twins, the mixed emotions attached to good memories and bad: “… the truth of what they had done wasn’t the truth of all that they were.”

When Iris rides west to earn some coin cutting peat, she learns a bit more about the puma they call Dusk, and that not everyone wants her dead. In Rossdale, news of yet another victim may put the bounty in doubt, but does nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of a certain charismatic individual for the hunt. Patrick Lees somehow convinces Iris: what can Floyd do, but reluctantly go along. “Floyd came to see that the greatest gift of his life was that he spent it riding by her side, and that the troubles they faced were worth it, and would always be worth it, if you had a sister like Iris.”

But when the three arrive high up where the rivers begin, where they are confident they will find the cat, a surprise awaits them, and things don’t at all go according to plan.

Arnott gives the reader a plot that takes a turn or two before a heart-thumping climax (or two), and protagonist twins who can read each other intimately and are deeply devoted: “A distilled terror drenched his broken body; he couldn’t watch what was happening, and neither could he look away. He felt he was coming to an end of all things, not merely in his life but in the life of the universe, for without Iris there was nothing – no reality that held him alive and not her.”

Arnott’s language is never a blunt tool, but gorgeous prose, rich and lyrical,. Whether a phrase, a sentence or a paragraph, it is exquisite, as these examples demonstrate: “… through the golden wattles while their last flowers still brightened the air. All that divine colour might have felt like an omen: heaven leaking between the trees” and “… watching the moon glow to life and pour its cold light onto the rippled sea” and “Rock and water had come to dominate the landscape: broken boulders fields of snow, mossy stones, mirror tarns and among it all little rivulets, trickling through the land as glassy arteries.” Once again, Robbie Arnott does not disappoint.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Astra Publishing House.