Julia Leigh
The Hunter

"… invites comparison with Peter Matthiessen's classic, The Snow Leopard." — New Statesman

"… within Leigh's vision there is power, raw and formidable. A writer to watch." — Kirkus Reviews

In the vast wilderness of Tasmania's plateau, the mythical Tasmanian tiger — the thylacine — long thought extinct, has been spotted, sparking the imaginations of the locals and drawing the dubious interests of outsiders. One such is M. His dispassionate objective is to find the thylacine for a multinational biotechnology corporation.

In The Hunter, Julia Leigh tracks M's course, from his base camp at the home of a young family who lost their husband/father to the wilderness, to the wilds of the woods where M immerses himself in the tiger's environment, reading footprints in the mud, looking for broken twigs, smearing himself with animal feces to cover his scent. As the hunt continues, M's trips to the plateau are of greater duration and his relationship with the tiger, which he hasn't yet seen, grows increasingly intense. For M, the tiger becomes an obsession, the hunter a stalker.

As the novel circles in on its ending and the hunter on its prey, the question becomes whether M still seeks the tiger for its genetic material and its repercussions on biomedicine or whether he seeks the very aspect of human life that technology has hammered out of existence.

Julia Leigh was included on the London Observer's list of 21 writers to watch for the 21st century. She is thirty years old and lives in Sydney, Australia. The Hunter, her first book, was published in Ausralia, England, and Italy.

"… M's obsession with the hunt drives this moody work by a gifted new author to its chilling conclusion." — Publisher's Weekly

"A very focused and absorbing debut novel." — Booklist