Last night I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing bestselling Australian rural fiction author, Fleur McDonald, at One Book One Temora.
This annual book event is held at the Temora Shire Library and the beautiful community of Temora comes out to spend an evening listening to an Aussie author, of whom they’ve all read one of the authors’ books for their book clubs.
Fleur is incredibly warm, kind, open and willing to share her knowledge about the book industry and writing fiction for over 15 years. She publishes two novels a year while still running a farm over in Western Australia. She is very involved in her small town community and gives back when she has time off everything books. This truly shows in her passionate discussions about the importance of community and connection.
And in talking about community and connection, one rural town that does it so well is Temora. The Temora Shire Library is a hub of chatter, regular borrowers and weekly program goers. The team there are not only approachable, full of life and generous, but they also represent a pivotal consistent hub in the small country town.
The wonderful Wendy handmade this super special Peachy 🐱 bookmark for me in thanks and I’m OBSESSED! How special and what a talent! Thank you Wendy, in more ways than one!
Writing this bookish experience and enjoying a delicious Eggs Benedict, I can’t help but smile and feel gratitude for meeting such wonderful people again this year. Being invited back to 2024’s One Book One Temora is an absolute privilege 💖
Australian Country Romance Author, Clare Fletcher 📸 by James Alcock
Clare Fletcher is an Australian novelist who has studied journalism, spent time freelancing and discovering different parts of the world. Yet, her stories continue to come back to the wonderful setting of rural Australia.
Clare and I had the pleasure of meeting in person this past July, to talk about Five Bush Weddings, her first novel, on a panel with talented romance/love authors.
Love Match is Clare’s second novel. It follows Sarah as she navigates dating in the small rural town of South Star after a recent breakup & Mabel, as she reminisces on her pieces of beautiful wardrobe, remembering the loving stories that come with each stunning outfit
I grew up in regional Queensland, in a town called St George. Even though I’ve lived away from there for many years – I went to boarding school, then uni in Brisbane, moved to Sydney to work, and even lived in New York for a while – my writing has often returned to those small town roots.
In Five Bush Weddings I wove in a lot of experiences of the country parties and weddings my friends and I would drive vast distances for. I hadn’t seen that part of Queensland on the page before, and so it felt right to keep real place names as a little gift to people from home. So many of the rural-set books published today are dark crime stories, so I wanted to celebrate the joy and resilience and creativity and complexity of regional Australia.
South Star is entirely fictional. WithLove Match I wanted to get deep into small town dynamics, the richness and claustrophobia of a place where everyone knows everyone’s business, so I couldn’t use a real town. I didn’t want readers to be distracted by errors in geographic detail or by trying to guess who characters are based on. It’s all made up!
Love Matchfollows the dual storylines of Mabel and Sarah, which is so fun and funny to read! When writing Five Bush Weddings, did you know that Mabel and Sarah would reappear in Love Match? And what do you feel made these two connecting characters?
I wish I had been smart enough to plan ahead, but I had finished 5BW when I decided to write a second book around Mabel and Sarah. My mentor Emily Maguire asked what happened to Sarah after 5BW, and the idea came to me pretty quickly – I wanted to explore someone discovering their queer identity under the small town microscope. I thought it would be powerful to mirror that journey with someone in an earlier time, and Mabel was so much fun to write. Once I started researching the period when she would have been a coming of age (1960s deb balls, country dances, the Miss Queensland Quest) I knew there was something special there.
Sport was another thing I wanted to incorporate. I think women often write off sport as something that’s not for them, but my own experience playing footy as an adult was really special. There’s a lot for women to gain from community sport, not just physically but socially, psychologically. And as a storyteller sport offers a lot of rich territory to mine.
After Love Match, I thought I was done with South Star. But now there are more stories I want to tell and I’m just using my own books as elaborate writing prompts! It’s all the side characters I have the most fun writing, so it’s quite fun thinking about how to use people in new ways in new stories.
Love, dating and connection are such strong themes in both your novels! Is this an element of writing that you always knew you’d incorporate or did it happen by chance?
For a long time, I was a bit of a literary snob. Only when I realised I was writing a rom-com did I start reading a lot more in the genre; but of course I had always loved reading and watching rom-coms, I just didn’t think they were as ‘important’ as more high brow culture. It felt liberating, energising and so joyful to realise there were so many talented women writing romance and rom-coms, and that I wanted to be one of them! I was a very romantic kid (in my head – no one wanted to kiss me until I was almost finished high school) so it feels inevitable in a way.
Sometimes I think dating men from Queensland trained me to be a good romance writer. With these blokes who are often quite reticent, if not emotionally constipated, you have to get quite good at finding romance and tenderness in small gestures! Being able to dial up the romance in a perfectly-made cup of tea or a dropped pie I think is more relatable than grand declarations of love from a bush bloke. That said, I love writing male characters and I find giving them strong women in their life helps shape them into realistic men who respect and treasure the women they fall for.Five Bush Weddingswas very much about the fact that people falling in love is critical to bush communities surviving and thriving.Love Matchgoes deeper into the relationships and institutions that hold small towns together and, I hope, makes a case for building a beautiful life there even if sometimes the gossip and lack of privacy might be challenging. I poke a bit of fun at small towns, but it comes from a place of love.
Clare, thank you so much for joining me on Author Talks and spending the time chatting on our Instagram Live. It has been an absolute pleasure to host you and meet in person! You’re now a staple in my growing library and I cannot wait to fill a shelf with your novels one day 📚⭐️
Click on the titles of Five Bush Weddings & Love Matchthroughout this interview, to purchase your own copies from Booktopia 💚
This past week I shared this beautiful illustration by @alevneto on my Instagram and the response was lovely 💖
Somehow this image incorporated warmth, care and gentleness. To me, it represented exactly how I was feeling the previous fortnight. I felt like I could finally rest my brain and allow those close to me to hold me up.
REAL TALK: Moods change and that’s okay. Something I’ve learnt through time, experience, professionals and wonderful friends & family, is that it’s okay to feel down, but it is absolutely necessary to allow those same people to hold you and lift you back up again 💫
WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words 📚 It is a book tag to broaden the reading community and help connect avid readers!
All you have to do is answer the following three questions:
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
CR:A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas (#2) is fuelling my ongoing desire to read fantasy that will consume all of my thoughts while I’m in it! Honestly, re-reading this bad arse series has been such a fantastic experience. With me reading them as an OG when they progressively came out from 2015 onwards, I was starting to feel as if I’d forgotten the plot lines, delicately woven connections between characters and that ultimate feeling of being captivated in a good romance/fantasy novel. If you don’t know what this series is about, we follow a human called Feyre who hunts in the woods near her house to provide for her starving family. There is a whole other world across ‘the wall’, the land of fae but since the last war there hasn’t been any real interactions with the other world. Until Feyre kills a wolf which is a fae in shapeshift. This plot loosely follow Beauty and the Beast, so I will leave the rest up to your imagination or eyes if you choose to read this fabulous series 👀
RF:A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (#1) – see previous as this is where the story of Feyre begins.
Comment below if you’d like a Book Review on the first novel 🎙
RN:Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor recently made the Stella Prize longlist of 2023 and to be honest, previous to hearing this announcement, I hadn’t paid the book much attention but GOSH am I glad I know about it now because I am so intrigued!! Iris follows the life and tribulations of Iris Webber, notoriously Sydney’s most murderous woman of the 1930’s underbelly era. Heck, that alone, how interesting to hear a fictionalised story from the perspective of a woman so well known for her sleuthing behaviours, dangerous reputation and run in’s with police. I hope this novel delivers in grittiness. That’s what I’m seeking from my next read – something to blow me out of the park! I’m on the reading hunt for my favourite books of 2023 … I wonder if this will make it …
WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words 📚 It is a book tag to broaden the reading community and help connect avid readers!
All you have to do is answer the following three questions:
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
CR:‘Words in Deep Blue’ by Cath Crowley is my current read. I’ve picked this book up as inspiration and current writing research. This dual perspective follows two teens on the brink of just finishing high school and the lead up to where their decisions will take them. Swirl in some romance, a setting in a secondhand bookstore, plus some beautifully raw writing, and you have the masterpiece that is this Aussie YA novel.
RN:‘Verity’ by Colleen Hoover is my first ColHo novel and I think it may be the only one suited to me … I’m yet to decide as I’ve only started the first few chapters. This psychological and disturbingly twisted thriller is said to keep you on the edge of your seat and gaping until the final chapter. This year I’m searching for fast paced and intriguing – I think I’ll get those things from this novel. Have you read this? Comment below and tell me your star ratings ⭐️👀
Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney was a quick, captivating and unexpected spooky crime read! I absolutely adored it 👻
Listening in on audio made this book a whole lot quicker for me to consume. With a cast of characters and repetitive events to help you recap and continue on through the story seamlessly, I was in a tight grip of waiting for events to unfold.
Who was killing everyone? How is the family riddle changing as family members die? Will Daisy Darker survive the night?
Daisy Darker is a novel about well, Daisy Darker. Daisy was born with a heart defect and due to this, her health had always been a battle as a child. With lots of scares and ongoing hospital admissions, Daisy’s bond with her reliable grandmother grew immensely. Daisy’s grandmother even went as fair as to write an award winning, and quite profitable, children’s book with a little girl called Daisy as the main character. Daisy siblings resented her immensely for this and for being grandma’s favourite.
In the present, Daisy’s grandmother is bringing all the family back together on her quirky, isolated island estate because she’d been told by a psychic many years ago that she would die at 80. Tomorrow happens to be her 80th birthday and she’d like to spend her last waking hours with her dear family … which also happens to be on Halloween.
Each family member has complex and strained relationships with one another. Daisy’s mother and father are divorced. Daisy never fit in with her two older sisters. Throw a boy in the mix, a niece and a secret accident that happened years ago and we have a recipe for messy murders.
I enjoyed going into this novel not knowing much about it and I would encourage you to do the same. I’ve tried not to give too much away in this mini review! Happy *late* Halloween reading 👻
If you’re looking to fall in love with a new country romance writer, Maya Linnell is your gal! She just gets it – the challenges of falling in love in rural areas, small town community feelings of support and shared business, opinions and expectations. She also holds a firm grip of what the dynamics of inside a family look like. Her writing makes you feel as if you’re sitting around a dining room table, in a country home, having realistic conversations about farming, family and children.
Paperbark Hill is the conclusion to Maya’s four book series following the McIntyre sisters. All books can be read individually but have overlapping characters, environmental settings and storylines. Believe me when I say, Paperbark Hill has set me up well for devouring the rest of Maya’s books!
Paperbark Hill follows Diana McIntyre and her 4 boys as they learn to navigate and continue on their lives after the death of their stronghold, their husband and father. Diana is surrounded by her loving sisters and father, who encourage her dreams of cut flower farming, selling locally and creating a name for herself in the industry. Flower farming and raising her 4 boys is the highest priority. This remains so throughout the novel. Her thoughts and feelings do however increase when Ned Gardiner, an ex-local comes back to town after the unexpected loss of his father.
Ned is a locaum pharmacist and a bit of a gypsy. His flexible job allows him and his two beautiful, sweet and worldly children to move around. This is bit of a relief for Ned after his wife and mother to his two children, just up and left. Ned’s routines and travelling is thrown out the window when the loss of his father brings him back to his home town. His father was a keen chicken egg farmer and flower gardener. It also turns out, his father was Diana’s sidekick in maintaining and starting her flower farming. Both Diana and Ned are feeling the heavy loss of Ned’s father, which ultimately brings them together.
The warm buzz between Ned and Diana grows. Their time spent together in the flower fields, bringing their children together for play dates, stopping for afternoon tea together and chatting over salty scones, are just some of my favourite subtle ways of their relationship growing. I really could appreciate that their relationship was about stability, trust and respect. They’ve both been hurt in the past, they both have children who are the centre of their world, and they are both trying to navigate new found love at 40+. It’s slow, romantic and the development of love grows through gesture.
I think Maya was clever to include some challenges to new found love at 40. She wove the protests of children surrounding new parental relationships and the questions they ask. Diana’s teenage boy found the adjusts hard and was defiant in letting a new person into Diana’s life. He felt as if Diana would forget about his father and not acknowledge significant past birthdays or anniversaries. However, he grows to realise that it is about a balance of blending the two together and recognising that Ned is never going to stop Diana from loving, thinking of, or celebrating her late husband. Ultimately Ned and Diana show harmony within their two families individually, therefore when they bring the two together, it is just a big group of love and happiness!
Reading Diana and Ned’s story had me swept away in a matter of 48 hours – I couldn’t step away from their story for too long!! I am incredibly grateful and humbled to have received this copy of Paperbark Hill from Allen & Unwin and Maya Linnell to personally read and review 💖 This copy of Maya’s book has already been loaned a friend to read and also love 💫
I am guilty of taking books home from work because they sound FANtastic! They sound up my ally. They sound like the kind of books I will (one day) read. And I’m sure I will one day read them …
I type these words as I glance over to my overflowing bookshelf and the pile sitting next to the bookshelf. And the two piles of books sitting next to my tv. And the pile of books in my tv shelf. And if I move my head to the side a touch, I can see the growing pile of books on my bedside … AHHHH
Okay okay, so my immediate TBR right now consists of:
Kinda wanna read a fantasy tho .. aye aye aye – the struggle 🤣 What does your TBR pile look like right now?
I sit here, writing this review with a cup of Italian coffee and biscuit in tow. I do not think I could have a set up any more fitting. Isobel Beech has created a novel that draws you in from the very beginning. ‘Sunbathing’ by Isobel Beech, takes place mostly in Abruzzo, Italy. The setting is described in such an emotionally and physically connecting way that you feel the Italian breeze, smell the freshly cut tomato salad with basil and olive oil, hear the gurgling of fresh coffee on the stove in the morning, and can imagine the footfalls and efforts of love in the vegetable garden below your window.
I need to preface that this novel does surround the topic of suicide, therefore please read this review with caution and/or pop back onto the blog for another book review soon xx
“… ‘Sunbathing’ explores the workings of the self in the wake of devastation and deep regret, and reveals the infinite ways that the everyday offers solace and hope.”. Transcribed from the back cover of ‘Sunbathing’. In summary, this quote covers the essence of this novel completely.
After suffering the great loss of someone close, an Australian woman books a plane ticket to Italy. She is travelling to stay with her best friend, Giulia, and her fiancé Fab, in their old stone village home. Isobel lets your mind wander as to the setting of this home, and I say home because this is the instant feeling the Beech portrays. It is a place of comfort, warmth, support and hope. We know there is a vegetable garden that Giulia tends to and waters from the buckets of water both the women go walking for every few days. We know that Fab is a writer and pops up to say “Ciao” whenever he hears his name being discussed, either inside or outside the home. We know Giulia and our female main character sit and talk over homemade meals deep into the evening, under the big shady tree in the back yard. We know our main character feels responsible for the loss of a significant figure in her life to suicide. We know that this feeling is one that plagues her mentally and emotionally. Her grief is incongruent to the way she believes is ‘expected’ of her – her grief does not follow a pattern.
It is incredibly unique how connected a reader can feel to the main character through the workings of their inner most thoughts and internal dialogue. The main character utilises online platforms to try and refresh her mind, yet only finds herself feeling more self-destructive after seeking it out. The online and in person conversations about suicide and taking ones life, she finds quite flippant. There is a sense of nobody knowing what she is going through, therefore nobody can help fix her and the significant shift to her life. However, the slow pace of life with Giulia and Fab in Abruzzo, learning to understand the language, making friends with a stray cat called Bric and taking care in planting, tending and caring for, then harvesting their own food and appreciating all it does for the human body, becomes her salvation. Day by day, the sun would rise, the coffee would boil and the routines would begin to heal her.
One of my favourite parts of this novel was seeing how the main characters perspective about Bric, the stray cat, changed over time. To begin with, Bric would only visit Giulia and Fab’s home every so often for food. He was more of a neighbourhood cat but this worried our main character. She was terrified that he wouldn’t return, he would become lost and starve. This became comparative to the loss of the significant person in her life. She felt that if she looked for Bric, fed him and cared for him, he would stay with her. Sadly, no matter how much nurturance and love she expressed to Bric, she couldn’t make him stay. Towards the end of the novel, our main character comes to accept Bric’s coming and going, taking the pressure off herself and understanding that Bric can only extend a portion of himself to her. Nor is he something she, and only she, can feel responsible for on her own.
I also really enjoyed the overarching concept of the old birthing room, turned guest bedroom, that our main character resides in while staying at Giulia and Fab’s home. Throughout the novel, our main character is rebirthing herself into a new person that lives with the loss and grief experienced in her life. It does not leave her completely, it just becomes a manageable part of the new person she’s growing into.
This is one of the most touching books I’ve read this year and I can see myself re-reading it in the future. It is surely one I will be recommending to my local literary book clubs. It is a novel to read with openness and care. I believe it is greatly worth it.
Before I jump into this book review, I would love to give one big hug and cheer out to Allen & Unwin, Echo Publishing and Averil Kenny for sending me this beautiful copy of ‘The Girls of Lake Evelyn’.
‘The Girls of Lake Evelyn’ is a story about a curse, a playwright and a runaway bride. It is a story that wraps you in hopes and dreams, and allows you as the reader to escape into a world where the essence of small community care, love and support trumps all adversity and challenge.
💬 Let’s talk main characters:
Vivienne Brinsley is a high society young women living in Sydney at the beginning of the novel. It is the night before her wedding to Sydney’s biggest catch and high market man – yet she’s torn with feelings of dread and despair at signing up to a life she doesn’t truely want. Her mother cannot stand to listen to her discontent, so Vivienne turns to her Uncle Felix. Uncle Felix helps Viv escape her loveless relationship and expected life. He sets her travelling on a path to a small town in tropical North Queensland. Here Viv will find her confidence again, explore new friendships and possibly even fall in love with a rugged, handsome and hilarious dairy farmer, Owen.
Josie Monash is a small town gem! Even as a young woman, she has grown up to be a pivotal part of her community. Side stepping her dreams of city starlight and broadway, Josie has remained on her family dairy farm to take care of her Father and two brothers after her mother passed away. Josies’ Grandmother plays a big role in guiding her life choices and has always been a headstrong woman (maybe this is where Josie gets it from). Her Grandmother is determined to see Josie’s theatre directing skills have hit reviews in Sydney’s biggest newspaper. Her Grandmother can see such potential and how tirelessly she works to help others – now it’s Josie’s turn to bloom. So when Vivienne arrives to town and starts swimming in the cursed Lake Evelyn, Josie’s hit play seemingly comes to life.
✏️ Let’s talk plot:
Not so many years ago, a beautiful movie actress, Celeste Starr, tragically died in the lake and it spawned a curse that has plagued the town ever since. Josie’s play is set to uncover the true story behind the life of Celeste, yet it will not come without some adversity and unsettlement from community members. Lake Evelyn has been barricaded off for years now because of community fear. Josie is up against a number of people who do not trust Lake Evelyn and its ghosts.
As Josie persists with the play, people will begin to show their true colours. A number of characters are not who they seem and their small, unsettling parts in the novel, eventually surface what true motives lie beneath. Long kept secrets slowly reveal themselves in the most well paced and slow burning way!
⭐️ Final thoughts:
I loved that this novel, much like Those Hamilton Sisters by Averil Kenny(click on the title to read my Author Talks with Averil). ‘The Girls of Lake Evelyn’ has all the good things you’re looking for in a time period novel. Drama ✅ Mystery ✅ Romance ✅ Perfectly paced reveals ✅ Escapism ✅
I’m not lying to you when I say we have had to restock this novel in the book shop over 5 times now! Averil is a hit!! Her writing is DEvine and captures the reader with such lyricism that it becomes hard to put her novels down. I am so incredibly grateful to see, hold and enjoy another novel from her and can only predict that Averil is set to continue creating beautiful stories in the future. She is an instant purchase for me and I will be recommending her until the cows come home (🐮 I hope this was an Owen approved pun!).
Mel Reviews Her Books 