In the soft morning light, the estranged father in French writer Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s The Son of Man drives his family away from life as they know it and into a dilapidated, isolated house in the forested mountains beyond.

A dangerous puma stalks the cold highlands of Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s Dusk. Two siblings must traverse a wild and haunted landscape in search of its bounty, soon discovering there is more to the land and its people than they imagined.

Widely regarded as France and Australia’s leading next generation literary writers, Del Amo and Arnott join Simon Wilson to discuss their intriguing novels that conjure both the wildness of the landscape, and the dark thread of ancestral violence that runs through them.