December's Digest: Books to Look Forward to in 2025, 14 Weeks to Go and—Dolphins!!!

It really is the downhill slide into the festive season now, isn’t it?! My family and I have decamped to our beach house for December and January, although my youngest is lucky enough to have been selected for an exchange in France. He’s heading off on January 6 for eight weeks of French life, swapping summer and the beach for winter and the experience of a lifetime. The rest of us will be soaking up the sun and I’ll be working with a view of the sea for the next few weeks, which is a very nice way to work, I must say!

My home for the next six weeks

And yes, I am working—because we’re getting everything ready for publication of The Mademoiselle Alliance in just over three months. I can’t believe it’s getting so close!

This will be my last monthly digest for the year—I’ll be back in January with the next digest. I hope I’ll have some time over the break to think about what kind of year I want 2025 to be, so I’ll share that with you in the new year. And for my paid subscribers, you have that first chapter extract of The Mademoiselle Alliance to look forward to in the New Year. I hope you’re excited about getting a taste of the story!

In this month’s digest:

• The Mademoiselle Alliance update

• Now available on NetGalley

• Books I’m looking forward to in 2025

• My 2026 book update

• Currently reading

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Book Tours, Endorsements, Proofreads—It’s All Happening at Writer HQ

Phew! This fortnight has been busy! It started with a fabulous publicity meeting with my team to thrash out details and logistics of the book tour. With Easter, school holidays and Anzac Day all jammed into April, we’ve had to be very enterprising when it comes to fitting in lots of tour events. But the tour schedule is shaping up so well!

There are morning teas, lunches, and all kinds of fun things to look forward to. I’ll have more details of the book tour in the new year, so stay tuned! As always, my subscribers will get the booking links before they appear on social media, so you all have the first chance to get tickets before they sell out.

I’m also very lucky that a few authors I admire hugely are reading early copies of the book right now and are starting to send in some absolutely beautiful endorsement quotes, like this one from Kate Quinn, who is the goddess of historical fiction. She said of the book:

THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE is a passionate, fiery tribute to a historical woman so extraordinary she almost defies belief. Marie-Madeleine is a young Parisienne with style and verve to burn, equally happy cuddling her young children, driving racecars, or learning to fly planes--but she'll need more than verve when her beloved France is invaded by the Nazis. Recruited to help build a resistance network known as Alliance, she lives on the run and comes to command thousands who revere her, even as she grieves the necessity of sending her children away to safety, and mourns every time she loses one of her spies to the Gestapo. Natasha Lester writes with razor-sharp research and evident admiration for a woman whose name deserves to be blazed across the pages of history.

KATE QUINN, New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network

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I’ve also just seen the first draft of the map that’s going in the Australian edition and—nerd alert—it got me very excited! So if geography isn’t your thing, we have you covered. You’ll be able to trace the path of Marie-Madeleine and her courageous team of agents through the story as they move around France, trying desperately to keep just ahead of the Nazis.

Right now I’m getting ready for the final proofread of the Australian edition. And then the book is done, finished, and I won’t be able to make any more changes, which is always both slightly terrifying and something of a relief. I’ve lived and breathed and laughed and cried over this book for two years now, so I feel very protective of it, but also ready to let it go out into the world—a bit like I felt when my oldest daughter went to Sydney for university this year!

But the good thing is that people who’ve read both it and some of my other books are wholeheartedly saying it’s my absolute best, which is the biggest compliment a writer can ever receive. So the countdown is on! Just over three months—or 14 weeks—until it’s out in stores. Aaaaahhhhh!!!!

PSA For Reviewers: It’s Now Available on NetGalley

If you’re a book reviewer and you’ve been dying to get your hands on an early copy of THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE, I have some good news. It’s now available to request on NetGalley Australia. For North American reviewers, I know the book was available on NetGalley as I’ve seen some of the early reviews. I’m not sure if it’s still available to request there or not, but take a look and fingers crossed that it is.

The reviews so far have been incredible—the book has a rating of 4.89 on Goodreads, which is gobsmackingly awesome!

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading in 2025

With the new year only a couple of weeks away, I thought I’d highlight some of the releases I’m most looking forward to in 2025. A couple of these I’ve been lucky enough to read already and I recommend you add those to your list immediately; the rest I’m eagerly anticipating reading.

• Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray. Victoria teamed up with Marie Benedict to write the bestselling book, The Personal Librarian. She’s writing about another remarkable Black woman from history in Harlem Rhapsody, the author Jessie Redmon Fauset. I’ve already read this one and it was a highlight of my reading year. Out Feb.

• Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld. Sittenfeld is an auto-buy author for me. I haven’t read the blurb, know only that it’s a collection of short stories, but I can’t wait for more of her wit and intelligence. Out Feb.

• When She Was Gone by

  Sara Foster
  . Sara and I are critique partners, so I’ve read this one a couple of times now and it just gets better with each re-read. The word addictive was invented for this book about a missing nanny and the child under her care, and a complicated mother-daughter relationship. Out April.

• Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. I loved Emily Henry’s first three books. My devotion faltered a little after that, but the blurb for this one—which riffs of Taylor Swift’s Last Great American Dynasty, one of my fave Swift songs—sounds right my my alley. Out April.

• Confessions of a Grammar Queen by Eliza Knight. This is another one I was lucky enough to read early and I just adored it. In my blurb, I said it was like Lessons in Chemistry but better, because instead of chemistry, it was about books. Out Jun.

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Another auto-buy author, the premise for this one sounds intriguing. I can’t wait to see what TJR does with a book about a female astronaut.

Let me know in the comments what books you’re looking forward to next year. And for more bookish posts, my paid subscribers received this post about my favourite books of 2024 earlier in the month.

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My 2026 Book

I’m up to my last draft before I submit in February! Woo hoo!

It’s always cause for celebration when I reach this point because the last draft is usually more of a tidy up and less of a dismantling and rewriting and should hopefully be relatively quick. I posted a video for my paid subscribers last week where I revealed the working title of the book, and there have been a few guesses at what the book might be about based on that title, but nobody’s quite hit the nail on the head yet!

I’m super happy at how this book has come together. It was a bit of a challenge because it’s quite different to anything I’ve written before, but I do love a challenge and the challenge was absolutely worth it. Now that I’ve wrestled it into shape, I adore the characters and the setting, which is something of a character in its own right—and it was fun to tease out what setting can do in a book when you want it to be more than just a backdrop for the action. Hopefully my publishers will love it as much as I do when I submit it in February.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been seeing The Wedding People by Alison Espach everywhere, so I grabbed a copy last week and that’s been my beach read. I’m only halfway through and really enjoying it. The set up is bonkers, but I love a book that can take a crazy set up and make it believable.

Before that, I finished Claire Van Ryn’s Where the Birds Call Her Name, which isn’t out until March, but one of the best perks of my job is getting to read books before everyone else. This is just a beautiful book. It’s set largely in Tasmania and tells the story of three generations of women fascinated by birds. Claire weaves fact and fiction seamlessly together and it’s one of those novels that you walk away from feeling like you learned something at the same time as you also read a great story. Add it to your list for 2025.

Next up is See How They Fall by Rachel Paris, which is also coming next year. I love the cover of this one and I’m looking forward to diving in.

And Lastly …

Have a wonderful festive season. Thank you for being here in 2024. I appreciate your support—you don’t know what it means to me to have thousands of people signed up to receive these posts. See you in the comments—let me know what you’re reading or what you’re looking forward to in 2025. I’m going to leave you with a photo of the gorgeous gift I was given by Mother Nature this morning: a dolphin that came right up into the shallows to say hello. Magic!