In the vast wilderness of Tasmania's plateau, the Tasmanian tiger - the thylacine - long thought extinct, has been spotted, sparking the imagination of the locals and drawing the dubious interests of outsiders. One of the latter is M, whose objective is to find the creature for a multinational biotech company. In The Hunter, author Julia Leigh tracks M's fateful course, from his base camp with a young family whose ranks were decimated by the wilderness, to the forests where M immerses himself in the tiger's world - reading footprints in the mud, covering his scent with animal dung. What begins as a business proposition takes on mythic aspects as M's quest becomes ever more obsessive, a search not for ultimate profit but for the essence of life that technology has all but crushed.