So many books, so little time.
Inevitably I work on several things at once: some nearly finished, some underway, some just scribbles.
When I’m devoting a significant amount of time and thought to a project, you can follow its progress here and on the blog.

I use Pinterest boards as sourcebooks for projects, vague ideas, drafts and doodles.

Fiction

Fine Eyes

Fine Eyes: Miss Bingley, Private Investigator is a collaborative project with Sharmini Kumar, founder of AustenCon and Jane Austen expert (she has adapted several Austen novels for the stage). It was our lockdown project, and imagines Caroline Bingley after the events of Pride and Prejudice applying her accomplished mind to the problem of murder in Regency London.

Roar

Roar is a novel for young adults set in the late 1980s. It’s inspired by a true story and set on a cross-country safari across Africa, in which people and things are never as they seem.

Grace

Grace is a novel for adults, based on the intertwined lives of the Irish pirate and rebel Grace O’Malley (Granuaile) and Queen Elizabeth I of England. It is told in two voices, beginning with the moment the two women met at Greenwich Palace in 1593.

Here are my blog posts about researching and writing Grace.

Wildfall

Wildfall is a fantasy adventure for teenagers. It’s about a rebellion and a war. And eagles.

Boots and the Bushranger

The Adventures of Captain Lightning is a series of short stories paying tribute to the nineteenth century traditions of the amateur detective serial. The stories are about two female bushrangers/amateur sleuths on the Victorian goldfields and in the High Country. The first story was written for the ClanDestine Press anthology And Then… and then I couldn’t stop.

Modern Girls

Modern Girls is about a group of artists and writers who come together in the south of France before the outbreak of the Second World War, to find their way through the threat of war, dramatic new possibilities in painting, photography and literature, and their own complicated lives.

War Songs

War Songs is a novel for adults set on the Somme during World War One.

Non-fiction

Sublime explores the idea that the way we travel and see the world now is all about searching for the sublime. It combines travel memoir, literary history, philosophy … and wonder.

I’m in the early stages of work on Sisterhood, investigating my own family’s involvement in the stories of the campaigns for women’s rights and for peace in the UK and Australia before and during the First World War – and in the 1980s.

My academic writing at the moment is all about “strong female characters”: what they are, where they come from, how they work, and the impact they have on readers.