Ronan’s Echo out soon

 

Happy New Year! We’ve had a truly traditional start to 2014, seeing in the new year with very old friends, people I’ve known for what is getting uncomfortably close to fifty years. Lex and I came down from the hot and humid north and are getting reacquainted with woolly jumpers, jeans and jackets. Not what you expect to be wearing in summer but that’s Melbourne, or to be more specific, Phillip Island. It’s a very welcome change, anyway. (Or it was until the heat wave rocketed through and upped the thermometer to 43C!)

 

My new book, Ronan’s Echo, is finished. The to and fro of the editing is done, the acknowledgements, back of the book and the front and end pages are sorted, and the all important cover has been finally decided after much deliberation between my terrific publisher and editors at Pan Macmillan, my lovely agent Selwa Anthony, and me. It’s a great cover, and will definitely make you want to pick it up! Your local bookshop should have it by the 25th of March.

Writing Ronan’s Echo has been a great learning curve and my first venture into general fiction. Outback Heart is a memoir, Brumby Plains, Castaway, and The Secret of the Lonely Isles are children’s novels, and all required levels of restraint either in language or construction, so I’ve had a wonderful sense of freedom writing this new one. Fiction books don’t usually carry a bibliography but I’ve included one for Ronan’s Echo, as so much of it is based on historical accounts.

It’s a story about the knock-on effects of trauma through successive generations of one family, stemming from the battle of Fromelles in France in World War 1. The inspiration came from meeting a young woman when we were sailing up the Kumai River in southern Borneo a few years ago. Caroline was a forensic anthropologist who had spent most of her career digging up mass war graves, identifying the dead, and compiling evidence for war crimes tribunals. Her next job was in France, working on the exhumation of a war grave which had been lost for close to a hundred years.

Like most Australians I’d never heard of Fromelles, Australia’s first battle engagement in Europe in the Great War. 5,533 Australian soldiers were taken out of the conflict in a matter of hours, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It was the first experience of war for most of the troops. Some of the soldiers were veterans of Gallipoli and the Boer War, but thousands were straight out of training in Egypt after enlisting a few months before at home. Fromelles is credited with having the fiercest barrage of ordnance of any battle in the first world war in a single day – and the battle didn’t start till 6pm. I began wondering about the effect that must’ve had on ordinary people, and the result was this book.

We printed out the cover and glued it to the proof copy of the book – can’t wait to see the real thing! I hope you find a copy when it comes out, and I hope you enjoy it. Do let me know.

Happy New Year, everyone,

best wishes – Jo

 

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