4 ⭐️

Dusk follows twins Iris and Floyd through the Tasmanian highlands as they hunt a human-killing puma who has been terrorizing the town.

The twins come from a life on the run: first as tools in their parents’ deceptions, and then as people forever stained by their lineage. But they’ve always stayed together.

I remember really enjoying The Rain Heron, and this was more of the same sort of story. My only complaint is the suspension of disbelief required to explain away some of the more “plot-armor” feeling moments. I understand Arnotte incorporates magical realism elements, but it didn’t feel like it justified it enough.

Overall a good, atmospheric read! I really enjoyed it.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC!

I have been waiting to get my hands on this book for nearly a year after seeing someone outside the states recommend it on their youtube channel. However, this was not available in the US even in ebook form that I could find. I was so thrilled to see this on netgalley with a US release date later this year!
This is my first Robbie Arnott book, and I will definitely be adding more to my list. His writing style was so beautiful and descriptive. I felt like I could see the upper highlands of Australia as I rode along with Iris and Floyd.
Iris and Floyd Renshaw are middle aged twins looking for any work they can find. They are enticed by a large bounty set for a man killing puma that is terrorizing the local graziers. As they journey to find this cat, you get a slow reveal of their backstory and childhood and you see how they got to where they are in the current time line.
This is a pretty short book (about 250 pages), and I savored every minute of it. It's different than anything I've read in a long while, 4.5/5 stars!

In his fourth novel, Dusk, award-winning Australian author Robbie Arnott continues to solidify his reputation as one of the most evocative stylists writing today. Set in the wild, mythic highland plains of Tasmania, the novel follows 37-year-old twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw as they set out in search of a legendary puma believed to be killing livestock—and hunters. Ill-prepared, debt-ridden, and physically vulnerable, the siblings are nevertheless drawn into a landscape that feels at once ancient and alive.

Arnott’s storytelling blends the elemental with the psychological. The twins’ fraught journey—part bounty hunt, part emotional reckoning—is as much about confronting their own shadowy past as it is about facing the creature known only as “Dusk.” Their childhood, marked by chaotic love and the infamy of fugitive parents, lingers like mist across every encounter. “The truth of what they had done wasn’t the truth of all that they were,” Arnott writes, capturing the novel’s central tension: the impossibility of fully escaping our origins.

What elevates Dusk beyond mere adventure is Arnott’s extraordinary prose—lush, lyrical, and laden with natural metaphor. The highlands are rendered with a painter’s eye and a poet’s ear: “mirror tarns,” “glassy arteries,” and “divine colour” illuminate the terrain and mood alike.

A tale of loyalty, wilderness, and the myths we build around what we cannot control, Dusk is a powerful meditation on grief, survival, and the profound ties that bind. Once again, Robbie Arnott proves himself an essential voice in contemporary fiction.

This was beautiful.
I felt like the land was the main character and it made for a very atmospheric and dreamy tale.
I loved the relationship between the the twins, so full of devotion and both hope and despair, which reflect in their interactions with others.
The quest is larger than we might think at first, and the ending was absolutely perfect.
Thank you Astra publishing for this ARC!

“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.

Robbie Arnott's work exemplifies my belief that love of nature gives you the soul of a poet. He is just incredible at making the land a character in his novels, and in his latest novel, Dusk, the characters work and grapple and commune and suffer and love with the land as much as they do with each other.

The novel follows Iris and Floyd, twins living on the outskirts of society as a result of hard times and reputations soured by locals’ knowledge of their outlaw parents. They cobble together their livings through temporary and itinerate work, and when they hear of a large bounty that has been placed on a puma, named Dusk, that has been killing livestock and men in the highlands, they think — despite their lack of hunting knowledge and experience — that this could be the solution to their financial problems. The trek that follows is desperate, harrowing, and somehow, thanks to Arnott’s skillful writing, beautiful.

I am truly in awe of the tapestry that Arnott has woven here, threading the highlands and the lowlands, the flora and the fauna (both real and magically real, as there is certainly more than a touch of magical realism in the plot of big cat hunting in a country that allegedly does not foster anything of the sort), and the people both native (although her physical presence in the book was small, I loved Iris’s meeting indigenous farmer Lydia, and her spiritual presence in the novel was so strong) and colonizing.

Arnott’s prose paints the land without overwriting; his description offers enough to create an atmosphere that allows your imagination to fill in the rest, and his turns of phrase are neither sparse nor bloated, just perfect, and ideal for crafting a story in which nature and country is so integral. I found myself reading this novel slower and slower as it went on, in order to savor it.

I’ve been recommending The Rain Heron to friends ever since I read it, and I think I’ll be doing the same for Dusk, as well as picking up Arnott’s other novels in order to sink into his landscapes. Thank you so gratefully to Netgalley, Astra, and the author for an ARC of this magnificent novel.