I listened to and enjoyed Robbie Arnott’s earlier novel Limberlost during a three-month road trip around Australia a couple of years ago, so I was excited to see that he has a new novel out this year: Dusk.

There are similarities between the two novels, even though the plots and settings are quite different. Both feature remote rural locations and exquisite evocations of nature. And both have deceptively simple, goal-driven plots, with a whole lot more going on beneath the surface.

In Limberlost, a teenage boy wants to buy a boat; in Dusk, two siblings track and hunt a puma. But Limberlost is not about the boat, and Dusk is not about the hunt. It’s about the characters and how they change in response to the situations they find themselves in.

The hunting premise wasn’t attractive to me, but I’m glad I stuck with it because this novel is about as far from a traditional hunting narrative as you could get. It’s not a story of human mastery over nature or the masculine drive to tame and subdue a wild creature or any of that garbage. It’s much more complicated than that, and much more satisfying as a result.

The twins, Iris and Floyd, have no experience of hunting a puma and no experience of the harsh mountain terrain they’ll be exploring. The puma, called Dusk, has already killed the experienced hunters who’ve tried to kill it. But they need money, and a hefty reward is on offer.

Why can’t they just get farm work or other jobs that are less likely to end in a bloody death? The answer involves a complex family history that emerges over the course of the novel and complicates the twins’ relationships with those around them. As they climb higher into the puma’s territory, it soon becomes clear that the danger comes not only from Dusk but also from the other hunters. Betrayals and suspicion abound, and they must make life-and-death choices about who to trust and who to stay away from. Needless to say, they don’t always get those choices right.

I won’t give away the ending since this is a new book that you might be planning to read, but I’ll just say that it’s not in any way predictable. By the time the twins find the puma high in the mountains, the simple quest they set out on has changed into something quite different, and they act in ways they never would have predicted when they first read of the bounty back in the lowlands.

Although the character development is a strength of Dusk, the depictions of nature are what sustain the narrative throughout. Here’s an early description of the plateau between the lowlands and highlands:

“A vast field of rock and tussock grass, tar black and wet brown, broken apart here and there by half-iced tarns and forests of small trees. The only shine in the land came from a few loaves of snow, soft wreckage scattered across the plain. In the distance, white peaks cut into a clear sky.”

It goes on like this throughout, with nature depicted so clearly and beautifully that the landscape becomes like a character within the novel. The overall effect is quite mesmerising, and this is a novel I’m happy to recommend. I’ll be looking for more novels by Robbie Arnott after this one too—let me know if you have any recommendations.