Lindsay Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Vintage, 1998.Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, its plot focuses on a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school who inexplicably vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic. It also explores the outlying effects the disappearances have on the school and local community. The novel was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was reprinted by Penguin in 1975. It is widely considered by critics to be one of the best Australian novels.Though the events depicted in the novel are entirely fictional, it is framed as though it is a true story, corroborated by ambiguous pseudohistorical references. Its irresolute conclusion has sparked significant public, critical, and scholarly analysis, and the narrative has become a part of Australia's national folklore as a result. Lindsay claimed to have written the novel over two weeks at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, after having successive dreams of the narrated events.An excised final chapter of the novel was published posthumously as a standalone book in 1987, titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, and also included critical commentary and interpretive theories on the novel. Another book, titled The Murders at Hanging Rock, was published in 1980, proposing varying interpretations. The novel has been adapted across numerous media, most famously in the 1975 critically acclaimed film of the same name by director Peter Weir.