Essays, Memoir & Short Fiction

In February 2020, I was writing a different book. We’d been living in London for five years, and my sister and her family were due to arrive for a three-week stay. I had seen reports, mid-way through the nightly news, of a novel flu-like virus in Wuhan, accompanied by unfamiliar images of rapidly erected temporary hospital wards. But there are often disquieting stories about faraway places at the mid-point of the news bulletin, and when my sister told me they were going to wear masks on the plane, […]

The following note about my love affair with Cornwall, featured in a Special Edition of The Lake House, published in the UK in 2016. Reading it now, some years later, in a room on the opposite side of the globe from that in which I wrote it, I am struck by how keenly I long to walk those coastal cliff paths again. For now, alas, I will have to rely on my memories and the magic of words to transport me.

In late 2019, I was asked by the Museum of Brisbane to contribute a story 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 hidden there. AT HOME ON THE RIVER BEND is the story of […]

One of the things I like most about being a writer is the challenge of communicating new ideas – or further exploring old ones in different ways; I particularly enjoy the marriage of content and structure, the ability of one to inform, and progress, the other. From the start, one of my intentions with my sixth book, The Clockmaker’s Daughter, was that the architecture of the novel should illustrate the idea that within a single house, particularly an old one, coexist many stories of the disparate lives led within its […]

I wrote this essay on the ten year anniversary of The Forgotten Garden’s publication. It seemed almost impossible to me that ten whole years had passed since Cassandra, Nell and Eliza first left my imagination for yours; and yet, at the same time, it felt like an age since I had been that young writer, living in a little wooden worker’s cottage cut into a steep slope in the shadow of the Paddington Antique Centre, just getting started on a manuscript about foundlings and fairy tales that I was still […]