Exciting News! And Beach Reads and Writerly Catch Ups & Book Recommendations Galore.

Something very exciting has happened(!), which is why this newsletter is a little delayed. Just as I was about to send it out last week, I was told this news, which was embargoed until today. So I hope you’ll forgive the week’s delay and celebrate with me instead. And the news is …

My most recent book, The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, has been longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize! This is such an honour; it’s the richest literary prize in Australia and while obviously the winner gets a huge sense of achievement, they also get $100,000!!

To have even been longlisted is something I’m very proud of and, quite honestly, a little shocked by. When you write so-called “commercial fiction”, you don’t really expect to see your name on awards lists, even if you’ve spent years researching and have uncovered new facts about important people, such as Mizza Bricard, one of the real-life characters in the book, who I wrote about in this post:

Courtesan and Muse, Or A Greater Designer Than Coco Chanel?

So yay! I don’t think I’ve stopped smiling since I heard the news. And what a wonderful organisation the ARA Group is to have provided funding for the prize. I wish more businesses in Australia supported the literary sector in such a meaningful way. You can find out more about both the prize and the books on the longlist here.

Now you all have to cross your fingers and toes for me. The longlist gets whittled down to a shortlist of three books in early October. I would love to be on that list! So I would really appreciate everyone sending good vibes out into the universe that The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard is one of the three shortlisted books. I’ll keep you posted!

Let’s Talk About Books

Thank you to those who responded to my survey in last month’s newsletter. If you didn’t have a chance to respond, you can still do so here (it’s very short, I promise). It became apparent that are lot of you are here for book-talk, and I’m all for that! So I published a post for my paid subscribers recently where I tried to come up with a list of my 50 favourite books that have been published this century. It was a bit of a challenge, but I managed it! And I’ve just taken the paywall down for a few days so all my subscribers can check out the list and comment too.

This Month’s Books

Sexy Time Travel

This month I read The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and got so drawn into the story that I finished it in less than a week. It’s a total page-turner; it’s been a while since I’ve felt such a strong compulsion to get back to a story that I’ve had to put down because of work, kids etc.

It’s a bit hard to précis, because summarising it just makes it sound strange. It’s essentially about the British government discovering a time portal and subsequently starting a project to bring a handful people from history into the present. One of the main characters is an Arctic explorer from the Victorian era, and the other main character is the woman assigned to help him adjust to contemporary life—and to report to the Ministry of Time on the success of his acclimatisation. Needless to say, they have all the feels for one another and (slight spoiler) have some very non-Victorian sex!

I loved it. There are a couple of places where the author’s themes are a bit too exposed and she could have left it to the already excellent subtext or trusted the reader a little more to understand what she had already successfully shown us, but that’s a minor quibble about a book that had superb narrative tension, a fabulous will-they-won’t-they relationship and a lot to say about history, race, colonialism and lots more. And it’s also very funny!

Too Many Ghosts

As well as that, I finished Lincoln in the Bardo, which I wrote about in an earlier newsletter. I think George Saunders is one of the best writing teachers out there and also the most generous—I’ve raved about his Story Club Substack many, many times. I’ve read a few of his short stories too, as well as the excellent A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is a mini masterclass in writing. So how did I fare with his one and only novel?

Well, honestly, I liked it, but didn’t love it. It was a bit uneven for me—some tender, gorgeous moments, but also too many moments that felt, honestly, a bit puerile? Am I allowed to say that about a Booker Prize winning novel?!

I think Saunders is an extraordinary writer, but our senses of humour maybe aren’t quite the same? And that’s okay. I’m still glad I read it.

As Cher Said, You Can’t Turn Back Time

From that to The Shell Seekers by Rosamund Pilcher. There are so many writers, especially of historical fiction, who say this is one of their favourite books. Perhaps if I’d read it when it first came out in 1987, I might have been one of them. But I read it in 2024 and I don’t think it’s aged well. It’s like it’s still wearing its 80s era fluorescent socks in two different colours—and not in a good way.

It started off well and then … it became a different book to what the first quarter promised. Instead of continuing along the vein of an intriguing intergenerational mystery about a precious artwork, it became a story of a set of very selfish people who kept secrets for no reason that I could see.

For those of you who read it years ago, are your memories of it as fond as many other people’s seem to be?

What I’m Working On

I’m in Sydney this week. On the weekend, I took my daughter to various university open days here. Since her big sister moved to Sydney in February to study fashion design, middle daughter has decided Sydney might be the place for her as well in 2026. Cue another strange mix of weeping and pride.

As well as visiting universities, I fitted in some fun, some art and some work. I saw Hamilton for the first time ever—one of the drawbacks of living in Perth is that the big shows don’t always travel to us across the desert—and I adored it. So much so that when I’m back in Sydney at the end of the month with my son, I’m taking him to see it too.

It’s always fascinating to me to reflect on “history”, a word that’s supposed to represent what happened in the past, but which actually leaves a whole lot out. And this is exactly what Hamilton is about—the many, many people whose individual stories can never be reflected in one simple word. That history shouldn’t only be about those who left records of themselves behind, but also about those who didn’t—and these are often the most interesting stories. And, of course, those are the people I write about in my books.

While I’m here, I organised a lunch with ten other authors, which happened yesterday. There’s nothing quite like writerly conversation to stimulate the soul and I don’t get to see my Sydney writing friends all that often. And what a gathering of talent it was!

It’s that time of the year when everyone is sick and that, combined with flight cancellations for others, cut our numbers down to six. Sitting around the table in the end we had

Belinda Alexandra

, Pamela Cook, Penelope Janu, Lauren Chater, Tania Blanchard and me. And we raised a glasss to those who couldn’t make it:

Vanessa McCausland

, Ali Lowe, Jenny Ashcroft, Rae Cairns and Kyra Geddes. They’re all incredible writers across a diverse range of genres, so if you’d like to support some Australian authors, you can do no wrong with any of the novels written by these talented ladies.

I also had the chance to catch up with my publisher at Hachette, Rebecca Saunders, who I haven’t seen in person for about two years! Phone calls are great, but nothing beats in-person conversations, especially when there was so much to talk about. As always, we had too much to say for the time we had, but we made the most of every precious minute, including talking about some early and exciting marketing plans for The Mademoiselle Alliance.

We’re also getting very close to finalising the Australian cover (you’ve seen the stunning North American cover already, but, as always, there are different covers for each different region). Stay tuned for a cover reveal in a future newsletter!

Speaking of The Mademoiselle Alliance, I’m soon to start on the copyedit, which is when it really starts to feel like a proper book, so that’s very exciting! (For writers interested in an excellent explanation of the editing process, check out this post from

Sara Foster

).

And I’m busily writing my 2026 book! I feel a little bit boring as there’s not really much to show or say right now—writing doesn’t look all that interesting from the outside, although there’s a LOT of fun stuff going on in my brain!

A Book Bargain

For those of you who haven’t yet read my book, The Paris Secret, which is one of my most translated titles—currently translated into twenty-one different languages—then now’s the time to grab a copy if you’re in Australia or NZ. The ebook is on sale for the month of September for just $4.99. Happy reading!

Curtis Sittenfeld Takes on Beach Reads & ChatGPT

If you check out my 50 favourite books list, you’ll see how much I adore Curtis Sittenfeld. So I was super excited and super intrigued when she shared a link on Facebook to a challenge she was set by the New York Times. She had to write a short story that qualified as a beach read—and so did ChatGPT.

There were a couple of other ingredients that the New York Times fed into both Sittenfeld and ChatGPT, and then they went away to do their work—for 17 seconds in ChatGPT’s case, and for a few weeks in Sittenfeld’s. Then the stories were published, with the author’s names only revealed at the end.

I have to say I knew which story was Sittenfeld’s—which one had been human-authored—from the first couple of paragraphs, which made me feel very happy and more optimistic about the strength of human art in the face of insentient art. What if I’d liked the ChatGPT one the best?! Quelle horreur!

Thankfully, there wasn’t much chance of that. As Sittenfeld hilariously said, the ChatGPT story was “The literary equivalent to a Ken doll’s genitals” (something’s missing).” 😆 Do you agree? Here’s the link to the stories.

It was especially good timing to see this because I was teaching a writing class on the weekend and I was working with the students on fresh and original language, encouraging them to really take the time to consider their word choices. We played around with similes for a time, and I pushed them to discard the first thing that came to mind because it’s usually a cliche. And to me, this is where ChatGPT’s story really fell down.

Any time it tried to use imagery, it was hackneyed. It was full of first draft, no-care-taken sentences that weren’t in the least fresh or original. Which made me wonder—if every time ChatGPT produces a story with this type of writing, does that reinforce the use of those cliches to the machine learning, and so the cliches become ever more hackneyed?

What I would say to anyone who thinks—and I’ve had a few people say this to me over the past few weeks—that ChatGPT could come up with a better simile than they could, is: no it can’t. Your humanness means you can make startling connections between objects that then become similes that will make the reader smile or get out their pens, ready to underline your beautiful prose. ChatGPT is fed on a diet of cliches, so it can only turn out more of the same. Trust your creative brain. It’s actually pretty remarkable.

Short and Sweet

• I’ve been watching: Shogun. It’s soooooo good. What happened in episode 9 blew my mind! I was not expecting that! And now I have no idea what direction the next season will head in, just that I want to watch it right now. Who else has watched it? I desperately need to discuss it with anyone who has in the comments!

• I’ve been reading: this hilarious post from

  Jojo Moyes
  about what it’s like to be a writer on a film set. I can only wish I’ll be lucky enough some day to find out how it feels to be less important than a catering truck!

• I’ve been using: I normally use etymonline when I’m searching for the first known usage of a word for my historical fiction, to make sure I don’t include any words that didn’t exist at the time, but thanks to my former editor at Fremantle Press, Georgia Richter, for alerting me to Ngram. It graphs the frequency of use of any word you input, which is a very useful tool for both historical novelists and word nerds!

• I’ve been wearing: these jeans from Citizens of Humanity via Jac + Jack. Day, night, rolled hems, unrolled hems, boots, heels, flats—they work every way and with everything.

• I’ve been thinking about: this post on awe. It ties into my social media break, which has given me more time to think and be creative and, maybe, to find some awe.

• I’ve been trying: a Learn to Draw class. Those who’ve followed me on social media for a while will know that I’ve dabbled in a bit of fashion illustration from time to time. But I’ve never really done a proper art class. So I thought I’d give it a try! The first class was all about continuous line drawing to get our hand-eye coordination working, which is something I’ve never really thought about in relation to art. And you know what? I did some horrible drawings, but also some not too bad ones! The best thing about it was how meditative it was to just give in to the process of keeping your pencil moving over the page and to not look at what you’re drawing. It reminded me a bit of first drafting—it’s always best to just keep moving forward, rather than giving into the temptation to correct something that isn’t yet whole. If I draw anything reasonable over the next month, I’ll post a pic for you!

Have an awesome week everyone! See you in the comments!