Media, Musings & Miscellanea

Carol Fitzgerald from BookReporter is a huge champion of books, and does a brilliant job of connecting readers and writers. I was so glad to be able to speak with Carol again recently; and, this time, as part of the Bookaccino Live Book Group series, I was doubly thrilled to be able to answer readers' questions directly. We spoke about what it was like to write during the pandemic, and the way that period affected all of our perspectives (whether we were trying to write books or simply to keep [...]

A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of talking all things books and writing with Natasha Boyd from BorrowBox. As a lifelong library lover, it was a privilege to be able to speak to so many librarians, along with devoted readers of all kinds. Our conversation ranged far and wide, covering the writing and editing process, the ideas behind Homecoming, the challenges of writing during a global pandemic, the difficulty of bestowing titles on novels, my childhood habit of losing library books, and my eternal fascination with time [...]

It's always a pleasure to talk books with Carol Fitzgerald at Bookreporter, and I was thrilled to have the chance to discuss HOMECOMING at length after its publication in April 2023. Happily, I will be speaking with Carol again for a Bookaccino Live Event on the 24th April 2024, at 8pm ET. If you'd like to attend, you can register HERE, or via the image below, and find out how to submit a question or your own, or even how to ask it yourself during the event. [...]

It was an honour this week to learn that HOMECOMING has been selected as a LibraryReads pick for April 2023. Libraries have played a huge and happy part in my life -- whether the small, stuffy room upstairs near the principal's office at Tamborine Mountain State School, or the council library near Staffsmith's Park at Eagle Heights, they have been places of infinite pleasure and possibility. I'm delighted to take this opportunity to send a shout-out to libraries and, most importantly, librarians everywhere -- thank you for everything that [...]

I'm thrilled to announce three virtual events being held in April to celebrate Homecoming's release. Events are open to US and Canadian readers, and are presented by Mariner Books, Simon & Schuster Canada, and some of the finest booksellers around; I'll be in conversation each evening with a bookseller or fellow writer, before taking part in a moderated audience Q&A. For further details, and to book your ticket, please follow THIS LINK. I so hope you can attend, and very much look forward to discussing Homecoming, writing, families, secrets, [...]

My publishers have made the prologue available ahead of publication and I’m beyond excited that at last you're going to meet these characters, this place, that mean so much to me. I started writing HOMECOMING in 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, when my family and I found our lives transposed from London to a farmhouse in the Adelaide Hills. It was a surreal time, but ultimately a creative one. Of all my books, HOMECOMING draws most closely on the landscape that inspired it: many of the sights, smells and [...]

Not so long ago, I wrote a short story. I don't often write short stories, but I was asked by the Museum of Brisbane to contribute to an exhibition they were planning called The Storytellers, in which they proposed to feature short pieces of writing by local authors corresponding with various inner-city suburbs of Brisbane. I believe that sense of place is integral to stories and was drawn to the opportunity to dig deeper into a location that I’d known for decades, to see whether I could find a story [...]

Last year I was thrilled to visit the State Library of Queensland, where the dedicated library archivists showed me some of their favourite treasures. This box of index cards belonged to Annie Wheeler, the widow of a Queensland grazier, who was in England when World War One broke out. Determined to be of service, Annie Wheeler moved to accommodations near the AIF headquarters in London and set herself up as a conduit between Queensland families and their loved ones on the battlefields. She kept track of each soldier’s movements, forwarded [...]

One of my favourite poems is Rhapsody on a Windy Night, by T.S. Eliot. I learned it by heart when I was eighteen years old and preparing for my Speech & Drama Licenciate exam with my old friend and teacher, Herbert Davies. It's a bleak and haunting poem about time and its passage, in which the speaker walks along a moonlit street at midnight, each streetlamp revealing striking images in the present that recall memory fragments from his past. I'm not sure whether I loved the poem back then because [...]

The Clockmaker’s Daughter will be released in paperback in both the UK and the US this spring, sporting an all new jacket in each place. In the UK, the paperback edition will hit shelves on the 18th of April, while in the US copies will be available a little over month later on the 21st of May. There are also bonus features aplenty: the UK edition contains a letter to readers and a brand new afterword; while the US edition includes a handy Chronology of Birchwood Manor and a Book Club [...]

Long before I was a writer, I was a reader. My parents taught me how and, from the moment I discovered that wonderful other worlds lived within the black marks on white pages, I was hooked. The older I get, the more aware I am that childhood reading - indeed, all reading - is a type of landscape every bit as shaping as the geographical landscape outside the window. Herewith - my life in books!

It's done! I'm delighted to tell you that the new book is finished and will be published in September/October 2018. It's another big one, as you can see from the rather large stack of pages on my kitchen table, and spans a number of periods between 1850 and the present day. It's set partly in Victorian London and partly inside a big old house called Birchwood Manor, which is tucked within a quiet bend of the Upper Thames. There are secrets and mysteries aplenty and characters to whom I can't [...]

In June 2017, I had the pleasure of reading from "Das Seehaus" (The Lake House) and answering questions for German readers, all while sitting in a small boat against the glorious backdrop of the Monrepos Lake Castle.

As promised, the new US and Canadian paperback jackets. All with gorgeous stepbacks (a hint of which you can see in the pics below). I love the way they capture the idea of stories within stories - gateways from one place or time to another, hidden texts, mysteries, secrets and hidden truths. A few of my favourite things, in case you hadn't noticed...   PS The scattered-petal image at the top of the post appears inside Secret Keeper.

I have been remiss in not posting sooner about my new Australian paperback jackets. If you’re in Australia or New Zealand and have a habit of getting lost amidst the shelves of your local bookstore, you might already have seen them? The hope was to capture a sense of history, mystery and secrets – of texture and layers of story – of past and present - and to reflect my (apparently insatiable) love of peel-y old wallpaper, houses in need of a lick of paint and forgotten photographs of people [...]

Happy New Year! This morning was so glorious that I couldn't resist a walk across Regent's Park. It was finger-tinglingly cold, but incredibly beautiful. Those bare branches! The long wintry shadows! The low sun turning the sky from gold to blue! I've been working on book 6 and look forward to sharing it with you as soon as it’s ready. The story is set in a number of places, both geographical and temporal (no surprises there!), but the main historical storyline takes place in nineteenth-century England - a treat for [...]

Hello dear readers, you might remember the Book Break episode I filmed in Cornwall last summer with the lovely Leena? (You can watch it here, if you missed it.) Recently Leena and I caught up again to talk Summer Reads. If you're looking for a recommendation, whether fiction or non-fiction, summer or not, you might see something in the video that piques your interest.

When I was on book tour for The Lake House (Das Seehaus), I was very glad to spend a few days in Berlin -- one of my favourite cities -- where I sat down with Viktor Buettner of 60Minuten.net to talk about writing, publishing, love of place, and life generally.

It's been a long time since my last post and a lot has happened. Most notably, the wheel has turned, the old year has spun away, and here we are in 2016. Just like that. I'm writing from a small desk in a small room in London. The view outside the window is of chimney pots and stained old bricks and black metal downpipes. The sky is milky and the branches are bare. We really are in the deep midwinter. It's been a strange year, though. Most of winter has [...]

So, here we are in October. From where I sit, typing this post, I can see through the window to where the leaves are turning yellow, ready to fall and scatter. I love the turn of the seasons: there's something thrilling and wonderful about the year in transition. It gives me a frisson of excitement and makes me want to be writing. To write is usually my first urge when faced with feelings of gladness. I suppose that's called inspiration, but if so it's the sort driven by a general [...]

While I was in Cornwall over the summer, I took some time out from skylarking along coastal paths and eating copious amounts of clotted cream on scones, to spend a few days with Pan Macmillan shooting an episode for their YouTube channel, Book Break. It was a lot of fun, not least because the show is hosted by Leena Norms who is as perspicacious and delightful in person as she appears on screen. We talked about the magic of Cornwall, the writing process, structuring a novel, lost children, Taylor Swift, [...]

I’ve been thinking about the sublime lately. It’s being here, in north Cornwall, where the coastlines are rugged, the cliffs drop suddenly away, and the blue ocean seems to stretch forever. The landscape is breathtaking. It’s dramatic and beautiful and craggy and flower-covered and enormous. And I feel small—happily, contentedly so. For a long time, Cornwall was harder to get to from London than Europe. It wasn’t until the 1850s, when the railway opened up the countryside, that city dwellers were able to journey—cheaply and comparatively easily—to such locations. How far [...]