This is a beautiful novel set in Tasmania. In the 1940s Ned West, a 15 year old motherless old boy who lives on a river and dreams of owning his own boat spends his summer vacation catching rabbits and selling their skins to make slouch hats for the soldiers. Too young to enlist, it’s his way of helping the war effort, but he also has a secret plan for the money he earns, one he keeps to himself. His two brothers are away at war and his older sister Maggie living in Hobart, has returned to the farm for the summer to help his gruff and distant father on their struggling orchard. His father is anxious about his brothers, particularly the lack of letters from the oldest and has no time for Ned’s ‘softness’ and sensitivity. When Ned accidently traps a spotted quoll, he finds a way to hide it from his father and nurse the fierce, but beautiful creature back to life. Whenever he can, he spends his free time fishing with his noisy, chatty friend Jackbird and his younger sister Callie on the river he so loves, but keeps his secret dreams to himself.

Although Ned realises his dream, it is short lived and the loss devastating to him. Even as he goes on to become a husband and father, the events of that summer will remain vivid in his memories. Robbie Arnott’s writing is beautiful and lyrical, redolent of the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape and of the exquisiteness of its flora and fauna. A moving and powerful read.

Very slow burn, and I found it initially hard to get into and struggled to establish the timeframes and characters. However as the story evolved I found myself totally captivated, even right to the last page. It was quite beautiful in its eloquence.

“Limberlost” by Robbie Arnott is a bildungsroman novel about Ned, a fifteen year old boy who lives in regional Tasmania. His two older brothers are away at war and Ned, his sister and his father are alone on their apple orchard Limberlost without news. A quiet young man, Ned spends his summer shooting rabbits and saving money for a secret goal. Despite the stifled wartime atmosphere, Ned builds quiet connections with people in his family and his community and, with only the memory of his brothers to guide him, begins to find his own way to becoming a man.

This is an introspectively lyrical book about a young man who, despite a rich inner life full of dreams and worries, struggles to communicate with those around him. Although Arnott puts it to the reader to decide how much of Ned’s quietness is his personality or a product of his circumstances, one thing I really enjoyed about this book was how much effort his family and community put into listening to him. There were some very poignant moments scattered throughout this book and one of the highlights was the way Arnott engaged with the Tasmanian landscape and wildlife. Ned’s experience with a whale resonates throughout the book, re-examined through different lenses of memory and emotion. At the heart of the book was the tension caused by secretly helping an injured animal and Ned’s longing for a boat, and I loved the way all the characters reacted and interacted with Ned around his decisions. The innate warmth of the characters and their actions contrasts strikingly against their stiffness and outwardly suppressed emotions.

While I was entranced by Ned quietly navigating his way towards adulthood, I found the other chapters of him as an older man less compelling. While there were some interesting insights, I felt that Ned’s summer shooting rabbits was so perfectly self-contained as a story that I would have been satisfied had it been left with that.

A beautiful and gentle story and I look forward to reading more of Arnott’s work.

A beautifully written book set in Tasmania. Ned West is a boy when the book opens and his older brothers are at war. The book follows major events in his life in an understated yet involving way. The descriptions of the natural world from the whale and its calf in the river to the quoll that Ned accidentally traps as a boy and nurses back to health; to the forest and river near his fathers apple orchard, Limberlost; and then the wonders of Huon pine that the boat is made of that he buys after shooting rabbits for their pelts. There’s more in this novel and it will stick in my mind.

Robbie Arnott's new book Limberlost is such a departure from his previous novels, while still maintaining the beauty of his prose, and his amazing story-telling talent.
Gone is the magical elements of nature, where flora and fauna have a voice. In its place is the 'magic' of nature, as the main character , Ned, spends a long summer exploring the forest and river that surrounds his home. His brothers are away at war, their fates uncertain, and his father is preoccupied just in holding the family, and the home together.
Ned spends his time hunting and trapping rabbits, while dreaming of buying a boat that will set him free upon the water.
It is a deeply moving, and thoroughly enjoyable story of family, loss and hope, in a time of war. By the end, I had completely forgot that I had been anticipating some magical realism elements, and had been completely captivated by this story and its characters.

“The spots on its pelt shone against the wood like a patterned moth, a living quilt”

Limberlost is the third novel by award-winning Australian author, Robbie Arnott. It begins in the mid-twentieth Century in rural Tasmania. At fifteen, Ned West is wary of horses, but when his older sister berates him and his father for their neglect, in her absence, of her favourite mare, all Ned wants to do is make it right.

His quiet, selfless solution unwittingly advances his progress to his fervent dream of buying a small boat, but that silver lining also has a cloud: his father’s hard-won approval is tempered by the revelation of a thoughtless act, the accidental trapping of a spotted quoll, something about which Ned feels confused and guilty.

Throughout his adult life, through work, marriage, fatherhood and into old age, significant, sometimes poignant, moments in his youth, in particular that fifteen-year-old summer, spring back into his thoughts, often jogged by the most unlikely of gestures, words or incidents.

In between waiting for word of his older brothers, absent fighting a war, and helping his father in their apple orchard, Ned’s summer school vacation was filled with trapping rabbits for pelts, fishing with his chatty friend, Jackbird, noticing Jackbird’s younger sister, Callie, and carefully nursing the caught wild creature back to health.

And unexpectedly, he found himself restoring an old dinghy to sail-worthy condition, enchanted by the wood from which it was constructed: “The odours of trees belonged to their leaves and flowers; he’d assumed timber would be mute. He wondered at his wrongness, as the wood spice filled his lungs, sank into his blood.” As he sailed the river, he imagined impressing his brothers with his skill and confidence when (if) they returned from the war.

The West family aren’t talkers: dialogue between Ned and his father, his sister and, in flashbacks, his brothers, is spare; much is implied; yet grief, financial stress, pride, disappointment are all succinctly conveyed. Ned frequently recalls his father’s pragmatic solution to his own five-year-old fear of a supposedly mad whale: “’If you’re going to fear something, boys, it’s best to understand it.’ He laid a hand on Ned’s scalp, his rough skin stilling Ned’s shivers. ‘To come right up against it.’”

It’s easy to be drawn to Arnott’s protagonist, to care about his fate: Ned West is pensive, reserved, tentative, but filled with good intentions, and completely devoid of any arrogance or guile: “These pulses of pride never lasted long. Ned wasn’t shaped to be impressed by himself”. This unassuming young man believes himself unnoticed, but his hard work and respectful attitude are not unobserved by family, friends and neighbours. The final pages can’t fail to bring a lump to the throat.

Arnott’s descriptive prose is so exquisitely beautiful, it’s hard to limit the quotes, be it just a few words: “his brothers’ faraway war-shadows” or a sentence “Falmouth kept looking at them. Stiff hair matted his scalp and fuzzed over his chin. Ned wondered if something within the man was broken or jarred. He was a loose sketch— unfinished, or in parts smudged out”.

“He was working in a logging crew to fell a large copse of manna gums— ancient hardwoods ghostly in colour and immense in height, some rising a hundred yards into the air to flail their leaves against the sky’s cheek. Aromatic, bloodlike sap ran from the wounds the men hacked into their trunks.”

And finally, “He’d likely never see the boat again, either. If he wanted to explain its uncommon beauty and the effect it had on people, including himself, especially himself, he would have to use the blunt tool of description— could not show it to anyone, and allow it to speak for itself. He didn’t even have a photograph”: Arnott’s is never a “blunt tool”. Once again, Robbie Arnott does not disappoint.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Text Publishing.

‘It was believed that a whale had gone mad at the mouth of the river.’

Mr Arnott’s third novel is set in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley. Ned West the youngest of four siblings, lives with his widowed father and sister on the family orchard, Limberlost. His two older brothers are away at war, and Ned wants to make his own contribution to the war effort. Ned hunts rabbits and sells their pelts which the army uses to make slouch hats for the soldiers. Ned inadvertently traps a quoll, and some of the most moving passages of this story are about Ned’s efforts to nurse the quoll back to health. But Ned has bigger dreams: he would like to buy a small boat. Ned dreams of freedom on open water and is obsessed by the story he heard of a whale that went mad at the mouth of the river.

Ned buys his boat and restores it but sacrifices it to keep the family orchard going. And Ned’s future is set. He marries, inherits the orchard and makes decisions which will impact on both his family and the valley.
Mr Arnott captures the beauty of the Tamar Valley and the moods of kanamaluka/the Tamar estuary. Ned, trapped on the land but dreaming of the water, makes what he considers to be the best choices for the future.

‘A marvellous invention—a poison that filled his trees with life.’

I know this area of Tasmania and remember the orchards that have now been ripped out and largely replaced by vineyards. But like Ned, I had little knowledge of the original inhabitants of the land. Ned’s daughters remind him, while his wife fights her own battles.

Ned’s story unfolds over decades of a long life: the teenager becomes an adult, a husband and a father. Mr Arnott brings the Tamar Valley to life with his beautiful descriptions of nature and shows us some of the impacts of man.

A beautifully written novel and one I recommend highly.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

A boy, a mad whale and an obsession. Limberlost is perhaps more conventional than the author's previous two novels, but it is still a great, imaginative read that captures the singular beauty of the Tasmanian landscape. In my view, Robbie Arnott's nature-writing is unsurpassed.

Ned West is the youngest of four, living with his widowed father on the family orchard, Limberlost, in the north-east of Tasmania. Not a child, but not yet old enough to join his two older brothers at war, Ned spends his summer holidays hunting and trapping rabbits so he can sell their pelts for making slouch hats. Outwardly, he claims this to be his very own war effort, but deep inside he has a dream that he can barely even admit to himself - he wants to save the money to buy a boat.

Almost goaded into confiding his plans to best mate, Jackbird, Ned soon finds his dream turning into an unstoppable force. But with no recent news of his deployed brothers, and the orchard failing, Ned struggles to reconcile his own potential happiness and fulfilment with the grim realities of family responsibility.

I enjoyed every moment spent in Ned's company, as he grew from teen to man to father. I cheered his successes and felt empathy for his losses. I shed a tear at the perfect ending.

Limberlost - Robbie Arnott
(At the request of the publisher, this review will be embargoed and posted online on the novel’s release date.)

Robbie Arnott’s much-anticipated third novel, Limberlost, feels recognisably steeped in the writer’s usual literary preoccupations, with a couple of significant points of difference. Following 2018’s Flames and 2020’s The Rain Heron, Limberlost feels less self-consciously clever, less busy, less ambitious, but entirely more honest. If Arnott’s previous two offerings have been a stage performance, Limberlost feels more like having a beer at the pub with a friend.

The novel tells the story of Ned West, a young man who lives on his family orchard in northern Tasmania’s Tamar Valley. Ned is trying to help keep the West world together while his brothers are at war, but beneath this preoccupation he has a secret: a longing for the freedom he has only ever found on the open water. Spanning decades, Limberlost explores the human relationship to land and sea, the power of the natural world to captivate, delight and terrify, and the ties of the human heart. It is simple, lyrical and utterly sublime.

There are, of course, the usual hallmarks that we might now come to expect from a Robbie Arnott novel: characters bounce back and forth across the geography of Tasmania with chaotic abandon, their relationships with animals reveal both the tenderness and savagery of humanity and the natural world, and there are lots and lots of gum trees. Crucially, Arnott’s virtuosic construction of the written word remains very much intact. The deceptively simple musicality of his language sounds with a pitch just as resonant as it has been in anything else he has written so far, and the result is a novel that is similarly unforgettable.

Limberlost is ultimately a tale about family, ambition and memory. Impressively, it does not suffer from Arnott’s commitment to step away from the broader mythology evident in his wider oeuvre. The depth of connection created between the reader, Ned, and all who surround the orchard of Limberlost is as profound as the portrayal of any of the broad cast of characters in Flames, and his protagonist’s relationship with an injured quoll is as moving as anything that occurs between the humans of The Rain Heron and its titular mythical creature. It is impossible not to admire the way in which Arnott continues to reinvent himself. With each novel, he takes a few steps in a new direction—always with the unmistakable hallmarks and expression that have helped make him so beloved as a Tasmanian novelist, but also with something fresh each time. In Limberlost we recognise a novelist who is not afraid to get his hands dirty, to keep himself grounded, and whose evolving literary style mirrors the novel’s themes of finding joy and satisfaction in simplicity. His writing has a freshness that has always been uniquely modern, but this book’s messages and thematic underpinnings ultimately return us to a life that is much simpler; where all that matters are the forests, the waves and human connection.

If there was ever any doubt, with Limberlost Arnott undeniably secures his position as the most significant Tasmanian novelist of his generation. As he proves himself a cut above, it is both ironic and perfect that his writing reminds us that the only things that really matter are not those that separate us, but those that bring us together: nature, love, and blood.