JANE Harper's initial hopes for The Dry, a page-turning murder-mystery set in drought-stricken rural Australia, were modest enough. Firstly, it was to finish the manuscript she had started, then it was to get published and onto book shelves.
But the enthusiastic reception for Harper's debut novel has exceeded all expectations – and then some.
Having gone to Pan Macmillan in a publishing auction, and sold to 20 countries, The Dry was optioned before its release by Reese Witherspoon, whose film production company spotted the Hollywood potential of Gone Girl and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies.
Since June 2016 the book has sold more than 50,000 copies in Australia helped by the passionate support of booksellers who pressed it into the hands of their customers.
And on Monday night those independent booksellers named the novel overall winner of 2017 Indie Book Awards, from category winners The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner, Circle by Jeannie Baker and Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley.
"I was happy enough just being published," says Harper, who gave up journalism to write full time in April and is a relatively new mother to seven-month-old baby Charlotte.
"Before that, even before I started writing it, my real aim was to actually finish. I had ambitions to write a novel for years, I'd never done it, I never really tried very hard and didn't get far with any of my attempts. And I wasn't sure if I could. So I really wanted to just try and finish, I wanted a beginning, a middle and an end story.
"I entered the Unpublished Manuscript award in 2015 and I just did that for a deadline for myself to try and get to the stage where I could show it to other people and get some feedback and once I won that it snowballed from there."
The Dry is a tense thriller that follows investigations into the suspected murder-suicide of a farming couple and their eldest child. It's told from the viewpoint of a Australian Federal Police investigator who, with his father, was run out of town years before following the discovery of a girl's body.
Like Peter Temple's Truth, The Dry manages to avoid the stereotypes of traditional crime fiction while invoking the crushing claustrophobia of the Australian landscape in drought.
Mosman bookseller Jon Page was a fan the moment he finished the advance copy which arrived on his desk in a bright red cover that read: The Book of the Year.
"The cynic in me went, 'I've heard that so many times before' and picked it up in January saying, 'Let's just see if this is book of the year', and it literally was."
Previous winners of the "Indies", as it is known, include Breath by Tim Winton, Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, All That I Am by Anna Funder, and the Man Booker Prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.
Page, of Pages and Pages, says Harper's book has the addictive readability of Gone Girl and thinks she will be bigger than Temple, Australia's only crime writer to pick up the Miles Franklin Prize.
"Peter Temple took five, six, seven books to break into the best-selling list. Garry Disher is great but he's never really cracked the top 10 bestselling list in Australia and Jane's done that with her first book.
"Not only did she crack the top 10 but she was number one for a good couple of months and she's still in the top 10 now.
"The crime genre in Australia has always been big [mainly>[/embedp>
