Five Great Books Set in Australia

Very chuffed to see my novel, The Swooping Magpie on this list of Five Great Books Set in Australia, alongside some fabulous Aussie authors!

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The thunderclap of sexual revolution collides with the black cloud of illegitimacy. 

Sixteen-year-old Lindsay Townsend is pretty and popular at school. At home, it’s a different story. Dad belts her and Mum’s either busy or battling a migraine. So when sexy school-teacher Jon Halliwell finds her irresistible, Lindsay believes life is about to change.

She’s not wrong.

Lindsay and Jon pursue their affair in secret, because if the school finds out, Jon will lose his job. If Lindsay’s dad finds out, there will be hell to pay. But when a dramatic accident turns her life upside down, Lindsay is separated from the man she loves.

Events spiral beyond her control, emotions conflicting with doubt, loneliness and fear, and Lindsay becomes enmeshed in a shocking true-life Australian scandal. The schoolyard beauty will discover the dangerous games of the adult world. Games that destroy lives.

Lindsay is forced into the toughest choice of her young life. The resulting trauma will forever burden her heart.

Reflecting the social changes of 1970s Australia, The Swooping Magpie is a chilling psychological tale of love, loss and grief, and, through collective memory, finding we are not alone.

Grab a copy HERE for only 2.99!

Sun, surf and Swooping Magpies

Gorgeous rainbow lorikeet

The old cliché, "all good things must come to an end" seems especially pertinent (and despressing!) as I sit back at my desk in dull, rainy, wintery France, after a sun-baked holiday in homeland Australia.



Apart from fun times catching up with friends and family, I was able to sneak in a bit of book promo, since my latest two novels, The Silent Kookaburra and The Swooping Magpie, are set in Wollongong, New South Wales (in the 70s).

First up was a radio interview with the charming Steve White on Tuesday Drive 104.5 FM. Here's a link to the video if you are interested.



Next was an Author Talk Event hosted by my local (Wollongong) library. It was great to see many familiar faces from my childhood and school years in Wollongong and to meet new friends from the many people who'd helped me with the books' research.

Figtree High School mates

Lovely book-seller helpers!

Book signing

You can get a copy of The Silent Kookaburra or The Swooping Magpie at your favourite retailer for only 2.99c!

Ten Pound Poms

Julie, one of the characters in my Aussie medical drama novel, The Swooping Magpie, is referred to as a 'Ten Pound Pom'. While this expression was very familiar to Aussies growing up in the 60s and 70s, others might wonder what it means.

"Ten Pound Pom" is a colloquial term used to describe British people migrating to Australia after WWII. Citizens wishing to migrate could do so by paying only £10 for their ticket. The government, who had set up this Assisted Passage Migration Scheme in 1954, paid the rest. Children could travel for free.

The Assisted Passage Migration Scheme was intended to substantially increase the population of Australia and to supply workers for the country's booming industries. The Government promised employment prospects, housing and a generally better lifestyle.

However, on arrival, migrants were placed in rudimentary hostel accommodation and often, as happened to Julie's father, the expected job was not readily available.

A newly-arrived family

The scheme attracted over amillion migrants from 1945 -1972, representing the last substantial scheme for preferential migration from the British Isles to Australia.

Assisted migrants were generally obliged to remain in Australia for two years after arrival, or refund the cost of their assisted passage.


If you'd like to know more about Julie, and the other characters in The Swooping Magpie, you can buy the novel for only 99c/p New Release price at your favourite retailer HERE

99c/p PROMO! #Aussie #PsychologicalSuspense Novel

I know I've been quiet of late, but my excuse, as always, is I've been working on a new book. And now I'm pleased to say that novel, The Swooping Magpie, will be published in a few days.

1970s Aussie domestic drama

Another Australian domestic drama set in the 1970s, it follows from number 1 in the series: The Silent Kookaburra.

To celebrate the release of The Swooping Magpie, the e-Book of The Silent Kookaburra will be on promotion for only 99c/p for the next few days. Get your PROMO copy now at your favourite retalier: https://www.books2read.com/u/4EyaqO

1970s Aussie psychological suspense

Book Description: The Swooping Magpie

The thunderclap of sexual revolution collides with the black cloud of illegitimacy.

Sixteen-year-old Lindsay Townsend is pretty and popular at school. At home, it’s a different story. Dad belts her and Mum’s either busy or battling a migraine. So when sexy school-teacher Jon Halliwell finds her irresistible, Lindsay believes life is about to change.

She’s not wrong.

Lindsay and Jon pursue their affair in secret, because if the school finds out, Jon will lose his job. If Lindsay’s dad finds out, there will be hell to pay. But when a dramatic accident turns her life upside down, Lindsay is separated from the man she loves.

Events spiral beyond her control, emotions conflicting with doubt, loneliness and fear, and Lindsay becomes enmeshed in a shocking true-life Australian scandal. The schoolyard beauty will discover the dangerous games of the adult world. Games that destroy lives.

Lindsay is forced into the toughest choice of her young life. The resulting trauma will forever burden her heart.

Reflecting the social changes of 1970s Australia, The Swooping Magpie is a chilling psychological tale of love, loss and grief, and, through collective memory, finding we are not alone.

#Australia-based #psychological suspense novel #promo

For a week beginning this Friday, 24th March, The Silent Kookaburra, my psychological suspense novel set in 1970s Australia, will be on promotion for only 99c/p on a Kindle Countdown Deal.

 Extract from The Silent Kookaburra, Chapter 2...

We left Wollongong around five o’clock, Dad driving the Holden to the Royal National Park, which was halfway up to Sydney.

While my father wrangled with the tent pegs, amidst foraging currawongs and crimson rosellas, Mum and I kindled up a campfire and roasted the snags.

‘Look at him.’ I pointed to a large flat rock. Behind it, a shy wallaby peeked out at us, rubbing its forepaws together as if clapping at our show.

‘Aw, what a sweetie,’ Mum said, handing me a sausage sandwich smothered in tomato sauce.

A magpie swooped over us, clacking her bill. ‘Quardle, oodle, ardle, wardle, doodle.’

‘Defending her nest,’ Mum said as we toasted the marshmallows.

Dad smiled, gave her leg a pat. ‘Like all good mothers.’

And in the falling darkness of the coastal breeze we followed the scents of the night creatures: long-nosed bandicoots, brush-tailed possums, sugar gliders and many others whose names I didn’t know.

The shriek of a sulphur-crested cockatoo woke me on the Saturday morning. I struggled from my sleeping bag, stepped outside the tent, walked towards the smouldering campfire and almost trod on a snake. Its slimy scales gleamed in the pearly dawn light.

I almost peed myself, but held it in, not daring to cross my legs; afraid to budge an inch. A blob of sweat dribbled into my eye.

Australia's majestic Kookaburra

‘Dad, quick, snake!’

My father lurched from the tent as the black snake reared up, its thick underbelly a streak of fire. Head pointed, forked tongue out, it fixed one dark eye on me and hissed.

My throat seized up, crazy moths flapped about in my heart. I wanted to run, to scarper from the snake as fast as I could, but Dad was holding up a warning hand.

‘No quick movements, Tanya. Just wait, it’ll slither away if you don’t scare it.’

Tears pricked at my eyes. ‘No, no, it’s going to bite me … to kill me. Get rid of it, Dad!’

Mum clutched Dad’s arm, a hand flying to her cowlick. ‘Do something, Dobson … just stay very still, Tanya.’

My schoolteacher’s voice clanged through my mind. Blackies can be dangerous … can hurt you badly but they likely won’t kill you.

The red-bellied black snake sure looked deadly to me. My bladder was about to burst; my legs wobbled –– jelly left out of the fridge in a heatwave.

Go snake. Just please go away, please.

Buy The Silent Kookaburra.

#Aussie-based #psychological suspense novel

After several years writing French historical fiction, I've tried my hand at a psychological crime novel. Set in Australia in the 1970s, The Silent Kookaburra is a haunting exploration of the blessings, curses and tyranny of memory.

All eleven-year-old Tanya Randall wants is a happy family. But Mum does nothing besides housework, Dad’s always down the pub and Nanna Purvis moans at everyone except her dog. Then Shelley arrives –– the miracle baby who fuses the Randall family in love for their little gumnut blossom.

Tanya’s life gets even better when she meets an uncle she didn’t know she had. He tells her she’s beautiful and could be a model. Her family refuses to talk about him. But that’s okay, it’s their little secret.

Then one blistering summer day tragedy strikes, and the surrounding mystery and suspicion tear apart this fragile family web. 

Priced at only 99c/p on Amazon until Christmas!

Paperback to be released in January.

Extract: The Silent Kookaburra...

Chapter 1

2016

Knuckles blanch, distend as my hand curves around the yellowed newspaper pages and my gaze hooks onto the headlines.

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY. January 26th, 1973. 165-year anniversary of convict ships arriving in Sydney.

Happy? What a cruel joke for that summer. The bleakest, most grievous, of my life.

I can’t believe my grandmother kept such a reminder of the tragedy which flayed the core of our lives; of that harrowing time my cursed memory refuses to entirely banish.

Shaky hands disturb dust motes, billowing as I place the heat-brittled newspaper back into Nanna Purvis’s box.

I try not to look at the headline but my gaze keeps flickering back, bold letters more callous as I remember all I’d yearned for back then, at eleven years old, was the simplest of things: a happy family. How elusive that happiness had proved.

I won’t think about it anymore. I mustn’t, can’t! But as much as I wrench away my mind, it strains back to my childhood.

Of course fragments of those years have always been clear, though much of my past is an uncharted desert –– vast, arid, untamed.

Psychology studies taught me this is how the memory magician works: vivid recall of unimportant details while the consequential parts –– those protective breaches of conscious recollection –– are mined with filmy chasms.

I swipe the sweat from my brow, push the window further open.

Outside, the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean is still a pale glow but already it has baked the ground a crusty brown. Shelley’s gum tree is alive with cackling kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets shrieking and swinging like crazy acrobats, eucalyptus leaves twisted edge-on to avoid the withering rays.

But back in my childhood bedroom, behind Gumtree Cottage’s convict-built walls, the air is even hotter, and foetid with weeks of closure following my parents’ deaths.

Disheartened by the stack of cardboard boxes still to sift through, uneasy about what other memories their contents might unearth, I rest back on a jumble of moth-frayed cushions.

I close my eyes to try and escape the torment, but there is no reprieve. And, along with my grandmother’s newspaper clipping, I swear I hear, in the rise and dump of its swell, the sea pulling me back to that blistering summer of over forty years ago.

To celebrate the release of The Silent Kookaburra, the first novel in French historical The Bone Angel trilogy - Spirit of Lost Angels - is also on sale for only 99c/p until Christmas at all e-retailers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords