Media, Musings & Miscellanea

The Lake House will be released on October 20th in the US and Canada, October 21st in Australia and NZ, and October 22nd in the UK. I'll be publishing more information, including videos and tour dates, very soon. In the meantime, here's a glimpse of what you can expect... *** An abandoned house… After a particularly troubling case, Sadie Sparrow is sent on an enforced break from her job with the Metropolitan Police. She retreats to her beloved grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall but soon finds herself at a loose end. [...]

There's an article in this month's Australian Country Style magazine, written by Claire MacTaggart, about my childhood on Tamborine Mountain. It was such a lovely piece to be involved with - the older I get and the more I write, the clearer it is to me how enormously my childhood experiences influence the way I see the world. Anyone who's read The Secret Keeper will recognise the Tamborine Mountain of my memory in the chapter featuring Vivien as a girl: running down to the creek, hiding under the ferns, watching the [...]

It was such a pleasure to chat with Sophia Whitfield from Culture Street about The Secret Keeper. I hope you enjoy the conversation. (And a small self-correction because the details always matter: Clive, my wonderful Blitz-time guide, was wearing a poppy in his lapel, not a carnation.)

Christmas in Australia doesn’t look much like a Nat King Cole song. Sandcastles rather than snowmen, surfing instead of sleigh-rides, and a lot of overdressed Santas handing melted chocolates out to kids. There are mangoes involved, lots of them, and a box of cherries that I have to hide or else I’ll eat myself ill. It’s hot outside, the sort of hot that comes laden with moisture, searing heat by day and cracking thunderstorms on dusk; the sort of hot that makes you want to sit very, very still beneath the [...]

I wrote this a little while back (a little while? That bump in my belly is about to turn four) for the Australian Women's Weekly, but I thought I'd share it here in celebration of Christmas being just around the corner.  

I'm in the middle of writing my new book and I love it. There's no feeling quite like that of being lost inside its world. It's the desperate, delicious, absorbing pleasure of reading - characters and setting and plot that come to life inside your mind so that you need to turn Just. One. More. Page - but a thousand times better. (It can also, occasionally, be a barren desert of a place, but that's a discussion for another time.) All writers write differently, and I was asked recently whether [...]

A while back I did an interview with Historical Novels Review. The journalist and I live in different cities, so the interview was conducted via email. This happens sometimes and it's actually my preferred mode of Q&A, not because I'm anti-social (well, maybe just a little bit), but because I always feel more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I do out loud. The list of questions when they arrived excited me. This isn't always the case with Q&As, and the reasons were twofold: first, they were things I hadn't been [...]

I am inspired by artists of all kind, and their unique and wonderful forms of creative expression. It was an absolute thrill to see what the London-based team at Andersen M Studio came up with in response to my novel, The Distant Hours, in late 2010. Eerie, elegant, haunting, and beautiful. I still have one of the miniature paper-cut castles on my desk, where I can see it when I work.Not only did Andersen M create this brilliant trailer, they also outfitted the (then) new Pan Macmillan HQ in [...]

In early November, 2010, I had the pleasure of speaking with Blanche Clark at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, ahead of the publication in Australia, and around the world, of my third novel, The Distant Hours. Some of the topics we covered include the writing process, research, the power of history, how to write with small children, and my mentor Herbert Davies. I also read the opening segment from The Distant Hours, in which Edie Burchill discovers a letter addressed to her mother, lost and undelivered for many years.

I think I might have mentioned the shiny first editions that have started arriving at my door? Gorgeous covers, thick powdery pages (oh, so many pages!), and the most glorious endpapers you've ever seen. This divine image from the front of the UK edition made me cry when I first glimpsed it, and I'm not an easy-crier. The artist has actually made real Juniper's lost letter: there's an historically accurate stamp, a proper postmark, and don't even get me started on the scratchy handwriting and little mouse nibble at the [...]

The Distant Hours is done, which means that I'm back in the real world and it feels wonderful. That is, it does now. It didn't immediately. The final period of a book's creation is such a dense, busy, all-encompassing place to be, that when the final pages are finally wrested away and sent to the printer, there comes an inevitable slump. A hole. A gap. A nervy, tic-inducing period in which people say things like, 'you must be so pleased', and, 'now it's time to relax', and although you smile [...]

'Another hobby of mine is reading and writing. At the show in 1982 I came first in my writing. I like writing the best out of them both.'