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.

A friend asked me recently what I love most about writing; I had to stop and think for a minute, searching for a way to explain. There are, of course, many parts of the writing process that I love. There’s a week, at the very end of the structural edit, when all of the efforts of the preceding year or two (or three) spent building the book, the copious drafts and revisions, and scribbled out lines and rewritten scenes, come together at last to enact a magic – the flicking […]

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 […]

Late last year I wrote a piece about Christmas that was published in various places around the world. I haven’t written much about my real life and I was surprised when I was asked to do so, but I loved the experience. It was a pleasure to conjure a long-ago evening back to life and to sit again for a while with my Nana Connelly. I think a lot about time (as you might have guessed from my books) and writing this article was a form of time travel for me. […]

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 […]

In 2009 the Brisbane City Council asked me to contribute to an anthology they were publishing called One Book Many Brisbanes. I grew up on Tamborine Mountain, a rainforest community in the hinterland of the Gold Coast, about an hour’s drive south of Brisbane, but both of my parents had been born and raised in Brisbane and I’d always considered it the big city to my mountain home. I came to know the place better after I moved there to go to university. I met and married my husband in […]

Many writers have stories about the person in their formative years who handed them the right book at the right time, and it just so happens that mine was a bookseller. His name was Herbert Davies and in 2009, when I was asked to address the annual conference for independent booksellers in Australia, I was glad to be able to reflect upon the part he played in shaping my early reading habits and, as a consequence, the rest of my life.

If you prefer to listen, rather than […]

In 2007, shortly after The Shifting Fog had been published worldwide as The House at Riverton, the Australian Women’s Weekly asked me to contribute a short story to their Christmas edition. I decided to write about a real life Christmas that my family and I had shared, which had already begun to take on fairy-tale proportions in my memory, and which we still talk about now. Some memories gain their burnish over time, but that morning in the medieval churchyard, as the snow fell thick around us, and […]