Faber announces ‘full blooded’ Australian debut Sunburnt Country

Faber will publish Sunburnt Country or The Hunted (title TBC), the debut novel by 27-year-old Australian author Gabriel Bergmoser.

Angus Cargill, Editorial Director, bought UK and Comm excluding Aus/NZ/Canada rights, from Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown. The book is scheduled for publication in late summer 2020.

Sunburnt Country has already been optioned for film by a major film company in LA.

In its home territory Sunburnt Country was sold in a major auction, with Australian rights bought by Catherine Milne at Harper Collins, from Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia.

Opening as a terrified young woman arrives at a service station in the outback with several cars in pursuit, Sunburnt Country follows her and the other inhabitants of the roadhouse as they desperately try to outwit her attackers.

Described as ‘a short, sharp shock of a novel’, Cargill said the novel ‘sits somewhere between the Aussie Noir of Jane Harper’s The Dry and the great 1970s survival movies, such as Deliverance, Duel, JAWS and Wake in Fright, stories which explore our fear of the other and which tend to emerge during periods of real social unease. I’m excited at the prospect of us publishing a novel as committed to narrative tension and full blooded storytelling as this. It should cause some strong reactions.’

Gabriel Bergmoser is a 27 year old Melbourne-based author, who grew up in a small rural town. In 2015 he won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award for his pilot Windmills and his plays include Heroes, which was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing. His musical, Moonlite, about a gay bushranger, was performed as part of the 2018 Midsumma Festival to critical acclaim, and was later selected for the Homegrown Grassroots development initiative. His first YA novel, Boone Shepard, was published in 2016 and nominated for the Readings Young Adult Prize.