Hope springs

A year ago today — in late September 2015 — I sent the manuscript of my second novel off to Georgia Richter, publisher and editor extraordinaire at Fremantle Press, with fingers crossed, but unsure what her response would be. I had had the pleasure of working with Georgia on my first novel, The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, and she knew I’d been working on this second novel for the past few years. But I’d worked on it in a strange kind of self-imposed isolation; before I sent the manuscript to Georgia, no one had read it but me. I honestly had no idea what her response would be.

Less than a month after she received my manuscript, Georgia phoned me to say that Fremantle Press would love to publish The Hope Fault. She said the most lovely things about the manuscript. She got it. I may have had a little cry.

It was a few months before Georgia had space in her schedule to get the manuscript back to me, with suggestions for tweaks and changes. We sat on the lawn at UWA, between sessions at Perth Writers Festival at the end of February this year, and she handed the manuscript back to me in a blue plastic folder. There wasn’t much to be done (which was a thrill in itself, after the hard slog that we went through to get Lena Gaunt ready to meet the world) — but the back and forth of it, the fine-tuning, typesetting and proofreading, and all that other lovely process stuff has taken the time it has taken. Finally, just this month, the book has gone to print.

You can see The Hope Fault‘s lovely, rainy front cover above, complete with quote from the magnificent Anna Smaill (her novel The Chimes was one of my top reads of 2015):

Brilliantly captures the prickly detail and the slow geological shifts of family life. It is an intricate, intimate novel — and utterly humane.
—Anna Smaill

A quote from the equally magnificent Myf Jones (whose novel Leap is beautiful, nimble, full of love and loss) features on the back cover:

This intricately stitched story, with its exquisite patterns and refrains, casts a spell over the reader. I wanted to stay wrapped in that house by the sea with its flawed family making magic and meaning from the vagaries of the weather, the landscape, and their own hearts.
—Myfanwy Jones

On the Fremantle Press website, you can find details about the book, including a media release, and download a sample extract. It won’t be too long before book club notes are available there — I’ve spent this weekend answering interview questions for them!

In the five months leading up to the novel’s publication in March 2017, I’ll be blogging about it. You can find a few posts already about the process of writing it — follow the link below.

Links and more information

• The Hope Fault will be published (print and e-book) by Fremantle Press in March 2017
• Details are available on Fremantle Press website: The Hope Fault
• The Hope Fault has a page on my website
• Read my blog posts about The Hope Fault