Meetup One Hundred and Thirty Four: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Hey team - It's a bit embarrassing, but over 130 novels later, we will finally be reading our first Australian classic novel. Popularized internationally by the 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, is a historical fiction novel set at an upper-class girls' boarding school in the rural backcountry outside Melbourne in 1900. A picnic is planned, on a perfectly normal Australian summer day, at Hanging Rock, but the day ends in mystery as 3 girls and one teacher go missing. Even after repeated searches the four women are never seen again. The novel follows the aftermath of the disappearance and the effect it has on the school and the local community. This is widely considered to be one of Australia's best novels.

Here's some critical analysis of the novel, if you're so inclined: https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1763896/steele.pdf

Penguin published a paperback edition of the novel in 2017 with a page count of ~220. I've found that version available on the shelves at McNally Jackson and Book Culture, and it's available for order at Bookshop.org. There is also a Kindle version available on Amazon.