Hayley Scrivenor burst onto the Australian crime scene with her multi-award winning debut Dirt Town. While Dirt Town was a crime novel it was also the dissection of a tragedy and even featured a chorus. Scrivenor’s completely different follow-up, Girl Falling, is completely different but is similar only in that it too is as much slow burn character-driven tragedy as it is crime fiction.
While on an ‘easy’ climbing trip in the Blue Mountains, Finn’s girlfriend Magdu plunges to her death. Finn was already down the cliff face but her best friend since school, Daphne had been at the top of the cliff with Magdu. Even from this instigating incident, readers will sense there is something strange in Finn and Daphne’s relationship. A relationship that slowly comes to appear more and more toxic as the narrative builds out their history, filled with its own tragedies and petty betrayals. And this starts to answer the question posed in the killer opening line of the book: Why would my best friend want to destroy my life?
Girl Falling cuts between Finn trying to come to terms with the tragedy in the present and vignettes from the past. In the present narrative Finn not only has to deal with the police investigation but with Magdu’s family who never accepted that their daughter was in a lesbian relationship. Rather than being linear, the flashback chapters jump around both Finn’s friendship with Daphne and her relationship with Magdu.
It is hard to talk any more about Girl Falling without giving away some of its key reveals. The amazing thing that Scrivenor does though, is make the reveals and reverses, when they come, both important and depressingly expected. Because this is a tragedy much of the ‘falling’ referenced in the title is metaphoric, so by the time the revelations srart to come readers will have learnt enough about Finn, Daphne and Magdu to be shocked but possibly not surprised.
Girl Falling by Hayley Scrivenor
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