The Mademoiselle Alliance

When I drafted this newsletter on Friday, I started out with the announcement of the title for my 2025 book. But then on Saturday, a man walked through Westfield Bondi Junction, a shopping centre I spent the best part of a day in just two weeks ago with my two daughters. The man stabbed eighteen people (according to latest reports), killing six and hospitalising twelve more. Five of the six people killed were women; one of those injured was a nine-month-old baby.

Most of you know I have an eighteen-year-old daughter in Sydney. And I couldn’t write this newsletter without mentioning the families of those killed or wounded, especially the mothers who were desperately trying to call their daughters on Saturday afternoon, mothers who were checking and rechecking Find My iPhone, Life 360 or any other location finder, mothers who were so relieved they almost cried when their daughters picked up the phone or called them back. Mothers who, the very next second, felt a pang of guilt and horror because they understood that their relief meant there was another mother out there whose call hadn’t been returned; a mother who was suddenly facing an abyss inside her in the place that had once been filled by the colossal, beautiful presence of her daughter.

Before my daughter started her job in a retail centre in Sydney, she had to undertake training in how to deal with an armed robbery. She giggled as she told me about it, unable to believe that anyone would ever come into the store brandishing a gun in order to steal the tiny amount of cash kept on the premises, or the cheap and cheerful products sold there. But she wasn’t laughing on Sunday when she told me she thinks they’ll all have to have training next week about what to do if a man walks through the retail centre where she works with a knife in his hand.

I don’t have any conclusion at all to draw from the three paragraphs I’ve just written. That the world is a terrible, violent place? But then I remember the two strangers who held and cared for the nine-month-old baby while its mother lay dying. I remember how much love I have for my daughter. I remember her giggle when, just six weeks ago she was innocent enough to believe that armed robbers were unlikely, imaginary creatures. I remember to hold onto everyone I love for as long as I have them, that conclusions are endings and there is never any end to love.

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It feels hard to move on into bookish news after that. Hard to make announcements and talk about nice things, fun things, future things, when people who had futures on Saturday morning no longer had them by Saturday afternoon, when families who waved goodbye to loved ones on Saturday at midday suddenly realised that farewell was forever.

But, as Joy Harjo says in her poem, “A Map to the Next World”:

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

And so I go on in the only way I know, with writing books, with hope, with the small things I have to offer in this map of the world that I am making, a map on which there is a road that intersects somewhere with a road on yours.

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The first piece of news I have, something I hope will make you happy, is that we have a title for my 2025 book. I truly love this title, which is:

The Mademoiselle Alliance is the story of the only female leader of a French Resistance network in WWII. Her name was Marie-Madeleine Méric (later Fourcade) and her story is one of epic love, tragic loss, heroic leadership and trying to juggle all of that with motherhood.

I can’t tell you much more than that at this stage as we’re only just starting to work on covers and blurbs, but as soon as I have some details, I’ll let you know. My US publisher has commissioned an illustrator to create the US cover, which is very exciting and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

I don’t think I’ve officially said this yet, but I won’t have a book out in 2024. After so many years of writing one book a year, I needed a break to refresh and recharge. Also, The Mademoiselle Alliance was a book that required so much research and a lot of emotional energy and I didn’t want to rush through or fail to take into account the intensity required just to get a book out this year.

What that means is that if you haven’t read your way through my backlist, 2024 is the time to do it. I think my books provide an escape from the world when you need one, they lift women who should never have been forgotten out of obscurity, and they also show us that history is both the present and the future unless we consider the lessons it wants to teach us, which is something worth reflecting on right now.

All the books in the image above are now available in Australia, North America and the UK in paperback, ebook and audiobook. Please note that The French Photographer and The Paris Orphan are the same book. My US publisher wanted to use a different title to the rest of the world, so please don’t make the mistake of buying both titles. You can find summaries of each book on my website. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about any of them.

Writing Update

My paid subscribers had a bit of an insight into the process of starting to write a brand new book, which is what I’ll be doing this week—opening a new Scrivener document on Tuesday when the kids go back to school and typing the first words of the first chapter, whatever they might be!

The Getaway Car (Ann Patchett’s, Not Taylor Swift’s!)

I’m also waiting for the final round of developmental edits for The Mademoiselle Alliance (I love typing that title!) and then it will start going out to foreign publishers for translation deals. I know I have lots of readers from non English-speaking countries, so I hope to be able to tell you that the book will be on its way to your corner of the world too.

Speaking of Foreign Publishers …

I had a fabulous meeting last week, via Zoom, with five members of my Spanish language publishing team. They’re based in Argentina, Spain and Mexico and have had huge success with El secreto de París, which is the Spanish translation of The Paris Secret. In fact, it’s one of their best selling books and I’m hugely grateful to everyone who bought a copy. It still thrills me that people on the other side of the world are reading my books in a language I can’t even speak.

The good news is that my Spanish readers can now look forward to Las tres vidas de Alix St Pierre, which is out now. I hope you enjoy Alix St Pierre’s story as much as you enjoyed Skye Penrose and Kat Jourdan’s. I love the cover so much; it’s definitely one of my favourites.

Writing Advice From Taylor Swift

My son, daughter and I sat down together to watch Taylor Swift’s Eras at last. And we had lots of fun, of course. But Taylor said a couple of things over the course of the concert that I actually thought were very applicable to the writing life.

The first was when she thanked the audience for letting her try different genres and styles of music over her career so far, for having the sense of adventure to be willing to embrace something new and not always want the same thing from her, for letting her have fun and experiment. Trying new things, having fun and experimenting are also really important for writers. And, just like musicians, it’s sometimes easy to feel like you’ve been locked into a genre box or, even worse, a box smaller than genre—some kind of sub-atomic particle of a genre.

But her words reminded me that we’re only ever locked into the cages we decide to stay within. We can still experiment and try new things; doing so may have consequences in terms of having to change publishers etc, but the choice to stay or to push the door ajar a little, or even to fling it wide open, is always ours. Which seems to me to be applicable to so many things besides writing.

The second thing was the bloopers at the end of the concert. There’s footage of Taylor getting tangled in her costumes and having to improvise and pull off a stuck shoulder strap or to stand on the stage tugging at sleeve that’s snagged on a skirt. She had a few choices there: to be mortified at the interruption to her practised routine and beat herself up about the mistake, to pretend it didn’t happen, or to share it with the world and let us laugh along with her. And I love that she chose the latter.

Instagram and the like have accustomed us to perfection, to stage-managed shots of interiors, filtered faces and chef-plated food. It was so nice to celebrate imperfection, to show that you can have just as much fun with the things that don’t quite work out the way they’re supposed to as you can with the things that go exactly to plan. Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time planning a book upfront and why I prefer to just sit down and write and see what happens: there will be bloopers, scenes that don’t work, characters I create and then erase, but there will also be the magic of the unexpected and that’s something worth enjoying.

Some More Thoughts on Social Media, Platform Etc …

In March’s Magazine, I also shared with my paid subscribers some more thoughts on social media and author platform because my March Digest created so much comment. I haven’t missed Facebook or Instagram yet and I’ve actually almost forgotten they even exist!

March Magazine: Wow, That Struck a Chord!

Reading Recommendation

My daughter recently came to me looking for a book recommendation. We often share recommendations, so this wasn’t unusual. She wanted something epic and engrossing, something she could take with her to Sydney and become absorbed in. So I recommended Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.

I recommended it with a caveat: the first book is quite hard going for at least the first third. There are lots of arcane and obscure references and lots of phrases in other languages that aren’t translated. You just have to concentrate on the context to try to get the gist of some of it. But if she could get through that, she’d be rewarded with one of the most epic, engrossing, brilliant series I’ve ever read.

I bought the first book at the secondhand book stall at the South Melbourne markets in 2001 when I was living in Melbourne. I worked my way through all six books over the course of that year, and I regularly revisit and re-read them. So, when my daughter decided to try the series, I decided it was time for a re-read. And they’re as good as I remember them. There is no more difficult, imperfect, occasionally unethical but always fascinating character in fiction as Francis Crawford of Lymond. So, if you feel like something of a challenge, something that rewards patience and concentration, then give the series a go. The first book is called The Game of Kings.

Thank You

Thank you for being here, for subscribing, for reading and for commenting. My father passed away almost three weeks ago and it’s been a strange time. A blessing for him, a man who’d endured Alzheimer’s for almost twenty years, which is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but of course there’s still grief and a sudden noticing of time and how it passes and a need to burrow inside one’s self and be quiet and still. I’ve done very little work at all since it happened, but it was good to sit down and write this newsletter, to feel productive, to achieve something, to feel like I can start writing a new book this week, to share this moment in time with you. So thank you. xx