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# Kate Forsyth

Kate Forsyth

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://kateforsyth.com.au/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [Blog](https://kateforsyth.com.au/blog/)
- [5 Essential Lessons That Will Make You A Better Writer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/5-essential-lessons-2/) - How do you reimagine a well-known story and still create a captivating and compelling narrative? I’ve spent the past few years researching and writing my latest novel Psykhe, which is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Eros and Psykhe. It’s the source of one of the world’s best-known and most beloved fairy tales,
- [Author Interview with Paul Morgan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/author-interview-with-paul-morgan/) - Paul Morgan is the author of two previous novels, The Pelagius Book and Turner's Paintbox, both published by Penguin. He was born in London, educated at the University of Wales, where he studied Philosophy and English, and lives in Melbourne, Australia. His most recent novel is The Winter Palace. Tell me about The Winter Palace In
- [The Winter Palace by Paul Morgan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-winter-palace-by-paul-morgan/) - The Blurb: If he had died, I would know it in my heart. In 1939, Anton, a captain in the Polish army, says goodbye to his wife, Elisabeth. He is leaving to defend their homeland against the invasion by Nazi Germany and Russia. They make a vow that – whatever happens, however much time passes
- [Count Stoneheart & The First Christmas Tree](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/count-stoneheart-the-first-christmas-tree/) - Here is an old German tale about he first Christmas tree, retold by me: A long time ago, in a small kingdom in Germany, there lived a young and handsome count, named Stoneheart by his people because he never fell in love, not once, no matter how pretty the girls brought to his notice. One
- [Why We Must Read Historical Fiction If We want to Change the World](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/why-we-must-read-historical-fiction-if-we-want-to-change-the-world/) - Kate Forsyth – keynote speech at the Historical Novel Society Australasia conference, October 2023 When I was a little girl, the two things I loved most in the world were gardens and stories. I had lots of the second. My mother and my grandmother made sure of that. But I didn't have a garden. We
- [Beauty in Thorns](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/beauty-in-thorns-chapter2/) - Beauty in Thorns by Kate Forsyth Chapter 2 Pretending to Be Drowning Spring 1852 Lizzie floated in water, pretending to be drowning. She had to stay absolutely still. If she moved even a little, the bath water rippled and the fabric of her silver-embroidered dress billowed. Then Mr Millais would heave a great sigh. She
- [Georgiana Burne-Jones](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/georgiana-burne-jones/) - Georgiana Burne-Jones (b. 21 July 1840 – d. 2 February 1920) Georgiana Burne-Jones is one of the central characters in my novel of the Pre-Raphaelites, Beauty in Thorns, along with her daughter Margaret, Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, all writers and artists in their own right. The daughter of a God-fearing Methodist minister, Georgie met
- [Susan Cooper](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/susan-cooper/) - Every year, as a Christmas present to myself, I re-read the work of one of my favourite childhood authors. It's a kind of gift of wonder and magic to myself, a reminder of the time when being given books for Christmas was my greatest joy. This tradition began with my decision a few years ago to re-read
- [Kate Forsyth on her favourite books set in Venice](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/kate-forsyth-on-her-favourite-books-set-in-venice/) - Today we are pleased to welcome Australian author Kate Forsyth to Historical Tapestry.
- [How do you juggle life and writing and other burning questions from an aspiring writer....](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/how-do-you-juggle-life-and-writing-and-other-burning-questions-from-an-aspiring-writer/) - I was recently approached by an aspiring author who asked my advice – I thought I’d share with you my response in case it is of help to anyone else: I am currently writing my first novel (in between juggling work and being a mother to my 2 year old son which has made the
- [February Newsletter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/february-newsletter/) - Fabulous February! I’ve had a wonderfully restorative holiday, but am back at my desk now, scribbling madly away. I’m hard at work on my new novel-in-progress Psykheand planning my research trip to Italy in May. I have crossed the 20,000 mark which means I’m close to a quarter of the way through the novel (I‘m
- [Interview with Alison Croggon – Monsters](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-with-alison-croggon-monsters/) - Alison Croggon is an award-winning novelist, poet, theatre writer, critic and editor who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She works in many genres and her books and poems have been published to acclaim nationally and internationally. She is arts editor for The Saturday Paper, and her most recent book is her memoir Monsters, published by Scribe Publications
- [Psykhe](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/psykhe/) - My Novel-in-progress I am deep into the world of Psykhe, my new novel-in-progress, and thought I would share with you a little of what I’m writing about. It’s a new departure for me – a retelling of an ancient myth known by most people as ‘Amor and Psyche’, or ‘Cupid and Psyche’. It is a
- [A Classic Rediscovered](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/a-classic-rediscovered/) - If there is any joy in this world greater than discovering a new book to love, it is rediscovering one that you have loved and lost. I willingly confess to being a bibliomaniac. This is, according to Maurice Dunbar, ‘a victim of the obsessive-compulsive neurosis characterized by a congested library and an atrophied bank account.’
- [Me and Janey Morris](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/me-and-janey-morris/) - Jane Morris as ‘Proserpine’ Painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1871) Jane Morris was an English embroiderer and artists’ model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty, her face appearing on many paintings created by her husband William Morris and her lover Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She died on 26 January 1914, at the age of seventy-four.
- [The History of Gingerbread Houses](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-history-of-gingerbread-houses/) - Gingerbread houses have long been associated with Christmas, along with gingerbread men, angels, stars, and trees. It is often said that gingerbread houses were inspired by the fairy tale ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and as I am always fascinated by fairytale lore, I set out to discover if this was true. The history of this delicious
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-coffin-path-by-katherine-clements/) - The Coffin Path is an eerie and compelling seventeenth-century ghost story set on the dark wilds of the Yorkshire moors. For fans of Michelle Paver and Sarah Waters, this gothic tale will weave its way into your imagination and chill you to the bone.
- [Mary Queen of Scots ](https://kateforsyth.com.au/uncategorized/mary-queen-of-scots/) - My novel The Puzzle Ring was partly inspired by my lifelong fascination with Mary Queen of Scots. My grandmother told me many stories about her, including the story of the bloodstain on her bedroom floor that no amount of scrubbing will wash away ... Mary, Queen of Scots, was one of the most intriguing and
- [The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-mercies-by-kiran-millwood-hargrave/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) After a storm has killed off all the island's men, two women in a 1600s Norwegian coastal village struggle to survive against both natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid the community of alleged witchcraft. Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching
- [Flight by Angela Slatter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/flight-by-angela-slatter/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) In a kingdom where magic is banned and rules abound, Princess Emer escapes to the forest. When an accursed raven pecks her hand, Emer is transformed and finds herself at the heart of a war between her mother and her aunt. Only the Crown of Feathers can set them all free,
- [The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-kill-artist-by-daniel-silva/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) Gabriel Allon had a simple but brutal job: he tracked down and eliminated Israel's terrorist enemies. But when his wife and son fell victim to the danger that accompanied him everywhere, Gabriel quit and devoted himself to the work of art restoration, an occupation that had previously been a cover for
- [The Salt Path by Raynor Winn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-salt-path-by-raynor-winn/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home and livelihood is taken away. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset,
- [The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-locked-room-by-elly-griffiths/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Pandemic lockdowns have Ruth Galloway feeling isolated from everyone but a new neighbor--until Nelson comes calling, investigating a decades-long string of murder-suicides that's looming ever closer. Three years after her late mother's death, Ruth is finally sorting through her things when she finds a curious relic: a decades-old photograph of Jean's Norfolk
- [Howard’s End by E. M. Forster](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/howards-end-by-e-m-forster/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. Howards End is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece. My Thoughts: This year
- [The Charlotte Project](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-charlotte-project/) - Did you know there are more statues of animals than women in Australia? And most of the existing statues of women are of Queen Victoria! We have an appalling lack of visible monuments to the incredible women who have contributed to our history and culture in this country. However, there is a nation-wide initiative to
- [The Enigma Affair by Charlie Lovett](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-enigma-affair-by-charlie-lovett/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): When librarian Patton Harcourt comes under sniper fire in her rural North Carolina home, she is thrown together with professional assassin Nemo and into a web of international deceit. On the run from two German killers, Patton and Nemo discover a seventy-five-year-old Enigma message which leads them to Bletchley Park in
- [Venus and Aphrodite: History of a Goddess by Bettany Hughes](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/venus-and-aphrodite-history-of-a-goddess-by-bettany-hughes/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Through ancient art, evocative myth, exciting archaeological revelations and philosophical explorations Bettany Hughes shows why this immortal goddess endures through to the 21st century and what her journey through time reveals about what matters to us as humans. Charting Venus' origins in powerful ancient deities, Bettany demonstrates that Venus is far
- [The Coast by Eleanor Limprecht](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-coast-by-eleanor-limprecht/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Alice is only nine years old in 1910 when she is sent to the feared Coast Hospital lazaret at Little Bay in Sydney, a veritable prison where more patients are admitted than will ever leave. She is told that she's visiting her mother, who disappeared one day when Alice was two.
- [The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-hand-that-first-held-mine-by-maggie-ofarrell/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): A spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood. Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself. Hedged in by her parents' genteel country life, she plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who
- [To the River by Olivia Laing](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/to-the-river-by-olivia-laing/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts
- [The Book of Wondrous Possibilities by Deborah Abela ](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-book-of-wondrous-possibilities-by-deborah-abela/) - The Blurb (by Goodreads): Arlo Goodman lives with his Uncle Avery in a run-down flat above their bookshop. He has no friends, except for his pet mouse, Herbert. But when a girl called Lisette bursts into the shop and begs him to hide her from a murderer, Arlo's life changes forever. He's swept up into
- [Guest Blog by Paula Beavan, Author of 'Daughter of the Hunter Valley'](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/guest-blog-by-paula-beavan-author-of-daughter-of-the-hunter-valley/) - “A book is a machine; every word is a cog or a part, and if it’s not adding to the smooth functioning of the machine, it needs to be moved, oiled, or removed . . .” Kate Forsyth 2014 These are the first words written in the notebook I took to the Cotswolds History, Mystery,
- [MY QUILT STORY](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/13536/) - In my novel ‘The Crimson Thread’, my heroine Alenka embroiders messages in secret code on her wedding quilt to smuggle clandestine information to the Greek resistance. I had to learn how to embroider in order to make sure that I described it properly in my novel. I had never sewn anything more ambitious than a
- [Author Interview with Hannah Kent](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/author-interview-with-hannah-kent/) - Hannah Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites, was translated into over 30 languages and won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, and the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Stella Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin
- [BOOK REVIEW: Wake by Shelley Burr](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-wake-by-shelley-burr/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): The tiny outback town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of Australia. Once a thriving center of stockyards and sheep stations, years of punishing drought have petrified the land and Nannine has been whittled down to no more than a stoplight, a couple bars, and a police station. And
- [BOOK REIVEW: Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Let me tell you a story… When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Forty Elephants by Erin Bledsoe](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-forty-elephants-by-erin-bledsoe/) - The Blurb (by Goodreads) London in the 1920s is no place for a woman with a mind of her own. Gang wars, violence, and an unforgiving world have left pickpocket Alice Diamond scrambling to survive in the Mint, the gritty neighborhood her family has run for generations. When her father goes to jail yet again
- [BOOK REVIEW: Horse by Geraldine Brooks](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-horse-by-geraldine-brooks/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads) A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a
- [BOOK REVIEW: Ciao Bella! by Kate Langbroek](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-ciao-bella-by-kate-langbroek/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): When Kate Langbroek first dreamed of moving to Italy, she imagined a magnificent sun-drenched pastiche of long lunches and wandering through cobbled laneways clutching a loaf of crusty bread and a bottle of wine, Sophia Loren-style, while handsome men called out ‘Ciao Bella!’ In the stark light of day the dream Kate
- [BOOK REVIEW: Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/orwells-roses-by-rebecca-solnit/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still
- [Interview With Christine Wells](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-with-christine-wells/) - Christine, welcome to my blog! Can you tell us what is your latest book about? ONE WOMAN’S WAR is about Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, the woman who is said to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond novels and her involvement in Operation Mincemeat, one of the most eccentric and effective intelligence deceptions of
- [THE STORY DOCTOR: Narrative Distance](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-story-doctor-narrative-distance/) - THE STORY DOCTOR So many people email me asking me for writing advice I have decided to begin a new section on my blog where I share my answers to these questions. Over time, I hope to build a wonderful resource for aspiring writers to help them diagnose what may be ailing their story ... Dear
- [THE SEAFORTH DOOM: A true Scottish curse which helped inspire my novel THE PUZZLE RING](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-seaforth-doom-a-true-scottish-curse-which-helped-inspire-my-novel-the-puzzle-ring/) - Earlier this week I wrote about THE PUZZLE RING, my children's time travel adventure set in Scotland, as it has a great deal in it about the old Celtic festival of Samhain (I think of it as the perfect Halloween read!) THE PUZZLE RING tell the story of Hannah Rose Brown, who was not quite thirteen
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Jarulan By The River by Lily Woodhouse](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-jarulan-by-the-river-by-lily-woodhouse/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Matthew Fenchurch, patriarch and landowner of the northern NSW property Jarulan, lives in a grand, decaying folly, invaded by ghosts and the local fauna. His wife is dead, one son has fallen on a battlefield in France, and another lives as a remittance man on a marae in New Zealand. With
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-anchoress-by-robyn-cadwallader/) - Sarah is just seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a cell that measures only seven by nine paces [...]
- [SPOTLIGHT: Fairy Retellings](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-fairy-retellings/) - A few months ago, I gave a speech on fairy tales at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. I've had a lot of queries from people who were unable to make it for various reasons (including vast distances) and so I've summarised my speech into a couple of blogs so everyone may enjoy. Here is a
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Letter From Italy by Pamela Hart](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-letter-from-italy-by-pamela-hart/) - 1917, Italy. Australian journalist Rebecca Quinn is an unconventional woman. At the height of World War I, she has given up the safety of her Sydney home for the bloody battlefields of Europe, following her journalist husband to the frontline as a war correspondent in Italy [...]
- [THE BLUE ROSE: My Novel-in-Progress](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-blue-rose-my-novel-in-progress/) - I have a secret page on my website that only those that search carefully can find. I call it The 50/50 Project ... It is a list of all my hopes and dreams - both possible and impossible - & all the places I hope to one day go and all the things I hope
- [VASILISA THE WISE & Other Tales of Brave Girls](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vasilisa-the-wise-other-tales-of-brave-girls/) - I have always been a great believer in serendipity. It's as if the universe sees a lacking, or a longing in me, and nudges something I need towards me. This time serendipity has brought about the most magical conjunction of events, which is going to result in a most beautiful book. As you probably know,
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Little Grey Girl by Celine Kiernan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-little-grey-girl-by-celine-kiernan/) - The old queen and her raggedy witches have fled Witches Borough, and Mup’s family has moved into the cold, newly empty castle. But the queen’s legacy lingers in the fear and mistrust of her former subjects and in the memories that live in the castle’s very walls [...]
- [THE BEAST'S GARDEN: Why We Must Always Resist](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-beasts-garden-why-we-must-always-resist/) - We live in soul-harrowing times. So much anxiety, so much terror. Sometimes I feel as if my heart is being broken every time I watch the news. Hatred, violence, bigotry and sadism seem to dominate our news screens and streams. I fear for my children and for our world. A few years ago, I wrote
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-girl-in-the-tower-by-katherine-arden/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): The magical adventure begun in The Bear and the Nightingale continues as brave Vasya, now a young woman, is forced to choose between marriage or life in a convent and instead flees her home—but soon finds herself called upon to help defend the city of Moscow when it comes under siege.
- [THE BEAST'S GARDEN: How a book can change your life](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-beasts-garden-how-a-book-can-change-your-life/) - Sometimes a book can change your life. The Diary of Anne Frank was that kind of book for me. I read it when I was twelve years old. I can still remember the awful shock of reaching the end, and finding out that Anne did not escape her attic, that she died in Bergen-Belsen when
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Finishing my Doctorate & Publishing my Exegesis](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-finishing-my-doctorate-publishing-my-exegesis/) - THE 50/50 PROJECT: Finishing my Doctorate & Publishing my Exegesis My novel BITTER GREENS was written as the creative component of a Doctorate in Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney. It retells ‘Rapunzel’ in a Renaissance Venice setting, entwining the fairy tale with the dramatic true-life story of the 17th century French noblewoman who
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Selling 1 million copies!](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-selling-1-million-copies/) - I have a secret page on my website that only those that search carefully can find. I call it The 50/50 Project ... It is a list of all my hopes and dreams - both possible and impossible - & all the places I hope to one day go and all the things I hope to
- [October Newsletter - Spring is in the air!](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/october-newsletter-spring-is-in-the-air/) - It has been a long dark winter spent in lockdown here in Sydney! Luckily for me I live near the ocean in Manly, and so I have been able to walk along the beach front or by the harbour most days, and work in my garden, and read in the early spring sunshine. My vegetable
- [VINTAGE REVIEW: Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-review-rising-ground-a-search-for-the-spirit-of-place-by-philip-marsden/) - Why do we react so strongly to certain places? Why do layers of mythology build up around particular features in the landscape? When Philip Marsden moved to a remote creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, the intensity of his response took him aback [...]
- [VINTAGE POST: Vasilisa The Wise](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-post-vasilisa-the-wise/) - To celebrate I thought I would explore the history of the titular tale, which is one of the best-known and best-loved Russian fairy-tales. An old oral tale, it was transcribed by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev between 1855-67 and first published in his collection, Russian Fairy Tales. There are many different versions of the story [...]
- [VINTAGE POST: The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone by Jaclyn Moriarty](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-post-the-extremely-inconvenient-adventures-of-bronte-mettlestone-by-jaclyn-moriarty/) - I was ten years old when my parents were killed by pirates. This did not bother me as much as you might think - I hardly knew my parents. Bronte Mettlestone's parents ran away to have adventures when she was a baby, leaving her to be raised by her Aunt Isabelle and the Butler. She's had a perfectly pleasant childhood of afternoon teas and riding lessons - and no adventures, thank you very much. But Bronte's parents have left extremely detailed (and bossy) instructions for Bronte in their will.
- [VINTAGE POST: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-post-bury-your-dead-by-louise-penney/) - It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has come not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. But violent death is inescapable, even in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical Society - where an obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder.
- [VINTAGE POST: Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-post-daughters-of-the-witching-hill-by-mary-sharratt/) - Daughters of the Witching Hill brings history to life in a vivid and wrenching account of a family sustained by love as they try to survive the hysteria of a witch-hunt. Bess Southerns, an impoverished widow living in Pendle Forest [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewwolf-winter-by-cecilia-ekback/) - Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There by Cheryl Strayed](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewtiny-beautiful-things-advice-on-love-and-life-from-someone-whos-been-there-by-cheryl-strayed/) - Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills - and it can be great: you've had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar - the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:The Winter Bride – Anne Gracie](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewthe-winter-bride-anne-gracie/) - Damaris Chance’s unhappy past has turned her off the idea of marriage forever. But her guardian, Lady Beatrice Davenham, convinces her to make her coming out anyway—and have a season of carefree, uncomplicated fun. When Damaris finds herself trapped in a compromising [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewthe-tenant-of-wildfell-hall-by-anne-bronte/) - This is the story of a woman's struggle for independence. Helen "Graham" has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage. Exiled to the desolate moorland mansion, she adopts an assumed name and earns her living as a painter
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:The Unlikely Spy – Daniel Silva](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewthe-unlikely-spy-daniel-silva/) - For Britain's counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable-a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:The Spare Room by Helen Garner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewthe-spare-room-by-helen-garner/) - How much of ourselves must we give up to help a friend in need? Helen has little idea what lies ahead—and what strength she must muster—when she offers her spare room to an old friend, Nicola, [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:A Sky Full of Birds: In Search of Britain’s Great Bird Gatherings by Matt Merritt](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewa-sky-full-of-birds-in-search-of-britains-great-bird-gatherings-by-matt-merritt/) - Britain is a nation of bird-lovers. However, few of us fully appreciate the sheer scale, variety and drama of our avian life. From city-centre hunters to vast flocks straight out of the Arctic wilderness, much-loved dawn songsters to the exotic invaders of supermarket car parks [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:Ophelia & the Marvellous Boy by Karen Foxlee](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewophelia-the-marvellous-boy-karen-foxlee/) - Unlikely heroine Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard doesn't believe in anything that can't be proven by science. She and her sister Alice are still grieving for their dead mother when their father takes a job in a strange museum in a city where it always snows. On her very first day [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Witch Child by Celia Rees](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-witch-child-by-celia-rees/) - Enter the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary's startling story begins in 1659, the year her beloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Wonder by R.J. Palacio](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-wonder-by-r-j-palacio/) - August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. WONDER begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: White Houses by Amy Bloom](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-white-houses-by-amy-bloom/) - Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:Some Girls, Some Hats & Hitler by Trudi Kanter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewsome-girls-some-hats-hitler-by-trudi-kanter/) - The astonishing true journey of Trudi Kanter, an Austrian Jew, whose courage, resourcefulness, and perseverance kept both her and her beloved safe during the Nazi invasion is a rediscovered masterpiece. In London, in 1984, Trudi Kanter's remarkable memoir was published [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewa-stranger-came-ashore-by-mollie-hunter/) - A wild, stormy night . . . A shipwreck . . . The sudden appearance of a stranger . . . That is how it all begins. The stranger is Finn Learson, a young and handsome man who seems to be the only survivor of the wreck. Finn Learson is charming [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Where the Trees Were by Inga Simpson](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-where-the-trees-were-by-inga-simpson/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): 'All in?' Kieran pulled me up, and the others followed. We gathered around the bigger tree. No one asked Matty - he just reached up and put his right hand on the trunk with ours. Kieran cleared his throat. 'We swear, on these trees, to always be friends. To protect each
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Tudor Vendetta by Christopher Gortner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-tudor-vendetta-by-christopher-gortner/) - Upon the death of Mary I (Bloody Mary), Elizabeth I takes the throne and Brendan Prescott is called to aid the young queen amid a realm plunged into chaos and a court rife with conspiracy. London, 1558. Queen Mary is dead, and 25-year old Elizabeth ascends the throne.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-wild-places-by-robert-macfarlane/) - Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-trauma-cleaner-by-sarah-krasnostein/) - Husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, wife. Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Whole Bright Year by Debra Oswald](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-whole-bright-year-by-debra-oswald/) - In the summer of 1976 it's picking season on an Australian stone-fruit orchard run by Celia, a hard-working woman in her early forties. Years ago, when her husband was killed as a bystander in an armed robbery, Celia left the city and brought her newborn daughter Zoe to this farm for a secure life. Now sixteen [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The River Sings by Sandra Leigh Price](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-river-sings-by-sandra-leigh-price/) - 'Look first. Reach second. Vanish third.' London, 1825: Eglantine has always had an eye for the shine. Born the same day as the young princess destined to be queen, Eglantine has an altogether different path ahead of her, strewn with the glittering waste of her father's ambitions.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Raven's Heart by Jesse Blackadder](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ravens-heart-by-jesse-blackadder/) - Scotland, 1561, and a ship comes across the North Sea carrying home Mary, the young, charismatic Queen of Scots, returning after thirteen years in the French court to wrest back control of her throne. The Blackadder family has long awaited for the Queen's return to bring them justice. Alison Blackadder, disguised as a boy from childhood to protect [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Road To Ever After by Moira Young](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-road-to-ever-after-by-moira-young/) - Davy David is a thirteen-year-old orphan, who lives in the bushes in a town ruled by a strict minister, Reverend Fall. A talented artist, Davy loves to draw pictures of angels in the dirt, in the early hours of the morning before the townspeople are awake. He spends his days on his own, except for a small dog [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Sequin Star by Belinda Murrell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-sequin-star-by-belinda-murrell/) - In an exciting timeslip tale, Claire finds an old trunk filled with her grandmother's treasures, including an old star-shaped brooch covered in sequins. Why does Claire's wealthy grandmother own such a cheap piece of jewelry? The mystery deepens when the brooch hurtles Claire back in time to 1932. Australia is in the grip of the Great Depression and people seek distraction fro
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ruin-by-dervla-mctiernan/) - For me, the best crime novels are tense, evocative reads, set somewhere misty and atmospheric that raises the hairs on your skin, with characters who are complex and alive, who you cannot help caring about, and written in terse language that nonetheless has the power to haunt you with its beauty [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-perfume-garden-by-kate-lord-brown/) - The Perfume Garden combines the gripping storytelling of Kate Morton with the evocative settings of Victoria Hislop to tell this sumptuous story of lost love and family secrets [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Pearler’s Wife by Roxane Dhand](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-pearlers-wife-by-roxane-dhand/) - From the high seas to the deep seabed, from the latticed verandahs of Buccaneer Bay to the gambling dens in Asia Place, The Pearler's Wife is a stunning debut, inspired by a small yet pivotal moment in Australian history. A distant land. A dangerous husband. A forbidden love [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-paying-guests-by-sarah-waters/) - The “volcanically sexy” (USA Today) bestseller about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed,
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-passion-of-the-purple-plumeria-by-lauren-willig/) - Colonel William Reid has returned home from India to retire near his children, who are safely stowed in an academy in Bath. Upon his return to the Isles, however, he finds that one of his daughters has vanished, along with one of her classmates [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Passengers by Eleanor Limprecht](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-passengers-by-eleanor-limprecht/) - Sarah and Hannah are on a cruise from San Diego, California to Sydney Australia. Sarah, Hannah’s grandmother, is returning to the country of her birth, a place she hasn’t seen since boarding the USS Mariposa in 1945. She, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the American Servicemen they’d married during World War II [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Paris Secret by Karen Swan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-paris-secret-by-karen-swan/) - With stunning locations and page-turning tension, The Paris Secret is an intense and gripping tale from bestselling author Karen Swan. Somewhere along the cobbled streets of Paris, an apartment lies thick with dust and secrets: full of priceless artworks hidden away for decades [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-paris-seamstress-by-natasha-lester/) - 1940. Parisian seamstress Estella Bissette is forced to flee France as the Germans advance. She is bound for Manhattan with a few francs, one suitcase, her sewing machine, and a dream: to have her own atelier. 2015. Australian curator Fabienne Bissette journeys to the annual Met Gala for an exhibition [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/vintage-book-review-the-mystery-of-three-quarters-by-sophie-hannah/) - The world's most beloved detective, Hercule Poirot--the legendary star of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and most recently The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket--returns in a stylish, diabolically clever mystery set in the London of 1930. Hercule Poirot returns home after an agreeable luncheon to find an angry woman waiting to berate him outside his front door.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-museum-of-modern-love-by-heather-rose/) - A mesmerising literary novel about a lost man in search of connection - a meditation on love, art and commitment, set against the backdrop of one of the greatest art events in modern history, Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present.[...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Muse by Jessie Burton](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-muse-by-jessie-burton/) - On a hot July day in 1967, Odelle Bastien climbs the stone steps of the Skelton gallery in London, knowing that her life is about to change forever. Having struggled to find her place in the city since she arrived from Trinidad five years ago, she has been offered a job as a typist under the tutelage [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Madonna of the Almonds by Marina Fiorato](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-madonna-of-the-almonds-by-marina-fiorato/) - Young widow Simonetta tries to rebuild her family in 16th century Saronno, Lombardy. In pursuit of a means to keep her estate together, she stumbles upon a new drink made by infusing almonds into alcohol. At the same time, she encounters the talented Bernardino, the protege of Leonardo da Vinci.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved he Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette  – Deborah Cadbury](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-lost-king-of-france-how-dna-solved-he-mystery-of-the-murdered-son-of-louis-xvi-and-marie-antoinette-deborah-cadbury/) - In 1793, when Marie-Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine, she left her adored eight-year-old son imprisoned in the Temple Tower. Far from inheriting the throne, the orphaned boy-king had to endure the hostility and abuse of a nation. Two years later, the revolutionary leaders declared the young Louis XVII dead, prompting rumors of murder.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-lost-flowers-of-alice-hart-by-holly-ringland/) - The most enchanting debut novel of 2018, this is an irresistible, deeply moving and romantic story of a young girl, daughter of an abusive father, who has to learn the hard way [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Locksmith's Daughter by Karen Brooks](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-locksmiths-daughter/) - In a world where no one can be trusted and secrets are currency, one woman stands without fear. Mallory Bright is the only daughter of London’s master locksmith. For her there is no lock too elaborate [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins by Antonia Hodgson](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-last-confession-of-thomas-hawkins-by-antonia-hodgson/) - In a new Georgian–era mystery by Antonia Hodgson, the follow-up to The Devil in the Marshalsea, Tom Hawkins prays for a royal pardon as he relives the espionage, underground dealings, and murder accusations that sent him to the gallows.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Lace Weaver by Lauren Chater](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-lace-weaver-by-lauren-chater/) - 1941, Estonia. As Stalin's brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina and her family survive only because their precious farm produce is needed to feed the occupying forces. Fiercely partisan, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother's precious legacy - the weaving of gossamer lace shawls [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-god-of-small-things-by-arundhati-roy/) - The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . . Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-gabriel-hounds-by-mary-stewart/) - It's all a grand adventure when English Christy Mansel unexpectedly runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus. And being young, rich, impetuous, and used to doing whatever they please, they decide to barge in uninvited on their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet—despite a long-standing family rule strictly forbidding unannounced visits.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Dry by Jane Harper](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review/) - A small town hides big secrets in this atmospheric, page-turning debut mystery by award-winning author Jane Harper. In the grip of the worst drought in a century, the farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily when three members [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-dark-lake-by-sarah-bailey/) - The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Brutal Telling – Louise Penny](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-brutal-telling-louise-penny/) - Chaos is coming, old son. With those words the peace of Three Pines is shattered. As families prepare to head back to the city and children say goodbye to summer, a stranger is found murdered in the village bistro and antiques store. Once again, Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are called in to strip back layers of lies,
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Bright Edge Of The World by Eowyn Ivey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-bright-edge-of-the-world-by-eowyn-ivey/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Set again in the Alaskan landscape that she brought to stunningly vivid life in The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey's second novel is a breathtaking story of discovery and adventure, set at the end of the nineteenth century, and of a marriage tested by a closely held secret. Colonel Allen Forrester receives the
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Botanists Daughter by Kayte Nunn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-botanists-daughter-by-kayte-nunn/) - Discovery. Desire. Deception. A wondrously imagined tale of two female botanists, separated by more than a century, in a race to discover a life-saving flower . . .In Victorian England, headstrong adventuress Elizabeth takes up her late father's quest for a rare, miraculous plant.She faces a perilous sea voyage [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-aviators-wife-by-melanie-benjamin/) - For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ashford-affair-by-lauren-willig/) - New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig "spins a web of lust, power and loss" (Kate Alcott) that is by turns epic and intimate, transporting and page-turning. As a lawyer in a large Manhattan firm, just shy of making partner, Clementine Evans [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Anger of Angels by Sherryl Jordan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-anger-of-angels-by-sherryl-jordan/) - In a world where it is a crime to speak against injustice, a jester dares to perform a play that enrages a powerful tyrant prince. The jester’s daughter, Giovanna, must journey into the heart of danger to turn back the terrible consequences unleashed by her father’s words – and becomes entangled in a treacherous plot to overthrow the prince
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-take-six-girls-the-lives-of-the-mitford-sisters-by-laura-thompson/) - The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Secrets Of The Tides by Hannah Richell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-secrets-of-the-tides-by-hannah-richell/) - Every family has its secrets. Some are small, like telling a white lie or snooping through a private drawer. Others are more serious, like infidelity and betrayal. And some secrets are so terrible they must be hidden away in a deep, dark place, for if they ever came to light, they would surely tear a family apart . .
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Secrets of the Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-secrets-of-the-sea-house-by-elisabeth-gifford/) - Based on a real letter to the Times by a Victorian schoolmaster reporting a mermaid sighting, Secrets of the Sea House is an epic, sweeping tale of loss and love; hope and redemption; and how we heal ourselves with the stories we tell. Scotland, 1860. Reverend Alexander Ferguson, naïve and newly-ordained, takes up his new parish [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Season of Storm by Susannah Kearsley](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-season-of-storm-by-susannah-kearsley/) - When Celia Sands arrives at a remote Italian villa to star in the first performance of a deceased playwright's masterpiece, she is instantly drawn to the mysteries surrounding the play -- and to her compelling, compassionate employer.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-rising-ground-a-search-for-the-spirit-of-place-by-philip-marsden/) - Why do we react so strongly to certain places? Why do layers of mythology build up around particular features in the landscape? When Philip Marsden moved to a remote creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, the intensity of his response took him aback.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Pureheart by Cassandra Golds](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-pureheart-by-cassandra-golds/) - Cassandra Golds is one of the most extraordinary writers in the world. Her work is very hard to define, because there is no-one else writing quite like she does. Her books are beautiful, haunting, strange, and heart-rending. They are old-fashioned in [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Philosophy In The Garden by Damon Young](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-philosophy-in-the-garden-by-damon-young/) - Why did Marcel Proust have bonsai beside his bed? What was Jane Austen doing, coveting an apricot? How was Friedrich Nietzsche inspired by his ‘thought tree'? In Philosophy in the Garden, Damon Young explores one of literature's most intimate relationships: authors and their gardens [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Peaches For Monsieur le Cure by Joanne Harris](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-peaches-for-monsieur-le-cure-by-joanne-harris/) - It isn't often you receive a letter from the dead. When Vianne Rocher receives a letter from beyond the grave, she has no choice but to follow the wind that blows her back to Lansquenet, the village in south-west France where, eight years ago, she opened up a chocolate shoP[...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Nine Days by Toni Jordan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-nine-days-by-toni-jordan/) - One family. Nine momentous days. An unforgettable novel of love and folly and heartbreak. It is 1939 and Australia is about to go to war. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business—your own and everyone else's—as usual [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-mrs-poe-by-lynn-cullen/) - A vivid and compelling novel about a woman who becomes entangled in an affair with Edgar Allan Poe—at the same time she becomes the unwilling confidante of his much-younger wife. It is 1845, and Frances Osgood is desperately trying to make a living as [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Molly & Pim & The Millions of Stars by Martine Murray](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-molly-pim-the-millions-of-stars-by-martine-murray/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): All Molly wants is to be normal like her friend Ellen Palmer. Ellen, with her neat braids and a tidy house and a mother and father who are home for dinner every night. But Molly's mom spends her mornings tramping through the woods, looking for ingredients for her potions. Their house
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies by Jackie French](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-miss-lilys-lovely-ladies-by-jackie-french/) - Inspired by true events, this is the story of how society's 'lovely ladies' won a war. Each year at secluded Shillings Hall, in the snow-crisped English countryside, the mysterious Miss Lily draws around her young women selected from Europe's royal and most influential families [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Madame Picasso by Anne Girard](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-madame-picasso-by-anne-girard/) - The mesmerizing and untold story of Eva Gouel, the unforgettable woman who stole the heart of the greatest artist of our time. When Eva Gouel moves to Paris from the countryside, she is full of ambition and dreams of stardom. Though young and inexperienced [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Longbourn by Jo Baker](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-longbourn-by-jo-baker/) - If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them. In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice,the servants take center stage.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Lighthouse Bay by Kimberley Freeman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-lighthouse-bay-by-kimberley-freeman/) - A compelling tale of love, secrets, and the power of forgiveness. 1901: Isabella Winterbourne has suffered the worst loss a woman can know. She can no longer bear her husband nor his oppressive upper-class family. On a voyage between London and Sydney [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-letters-from-skye-by-jessica-brockmole/) - March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when her first fan letter arrives, from a college student, David Graham, in far-away America [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Lethal White by Robert Galbraith](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/vintage-book-review-lethal-white-by-robert-galbraith/) - When Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed, and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Ingo by Helen Dunmore](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-ingo-by-helen-dunmore/) - Sapphire's father mysteriously vanishes into the waves off the Cornwall coast where her family has always lived. She misses him terribly, and she longs to hear his spellbinding tales about the Mer, who live in the underwater kingdom [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Hanns & Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz by Thomas Harding](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-hanns-rudolf-the-true-story-of-the-german-jew-who-tracked-down-and-caught-the-kommandant-of-auschwitz-by-thomas-harding/) - May 1945. In the aftermath of the Second Word War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Goddess by Kelly Gardiner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-goddess-by-kelly-gardiner/) - Versailles, 1686: Julie d'Aubigny, a striking young girl taught to fence and fight in the court of the Sun King, is taken as mistress by the King's Master of Horse. Tempestuous, swashbuckling and volatile [..]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-gift-from-the-sea-by-anne-morrow-lindbergh/) - In this inimitable, beloved classic—graceful, lucid and lyrical—Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea. Drawing inspiration from the shells [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-ghost-empire-by-richard-fidler/) - In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard's passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire - centred around the legendary Constantinople - we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilizations, the fall of empires [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Den of Wolves by Juliet Marillier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-den-of-wolves-by-juliet-marillier/) - Healer Blackthorn knows all too well the rules of her bond to the fey: seek no vengeance, help any who ask, do only good. But after the recent ordeal she and her companion, Grim, have suffered, she knows she cannot let go of her quest to bring justice to the man who ruined her life.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Flame of Seven Waters by Juliet Marillier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-flame-of-seven-waters-by-juliet-marillier/) - Going home can be the hardest thing of all...When Maeve, twenty year old daughter of Lord Sean of Sevenwaters, accompanies a skittish horse back to Erin, she must confront her demons. For Maeve carries the legacy of a childhood fire in her crippled hands. She has lived with her aunt in Britain [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Ember Island by Kimberley Freeman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-ember-island-by-kimberley-freeman/) - 1890: Orphaned as a small child, Tilly Kirkland found a loving, safe home with her grandfather in Dorset. But nineteenth-century England is an unforgiving place for a young woman with limited means and as her grandfather's health fails [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot & Bryan Talbot](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-dotter-of-her-fathers-eyes-by-mary-m-talbot-bryan-talbot/) - Part personal history, part biography, Dotter of Her Father''s Eyes contrasts two coming-of-age narratives: that of Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, and that of author Mary Talbot, daughter of the eminent Joycean [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-code-name-verity-by-elizabeth-wein/) - Oct. 11th, 1943 - A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun. When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Clara and Mr Tiffany by Susan Vreeland](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-clara-and-mr-tiffany-by-susan-vreeland/) - Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the twentieth century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, bestselling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Citadel by Kate Mosse](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-citadel-by-kate-mosse-2/) - 1942, Nazi-occupied France. Sandrine, a spirited and courageous nineteen-year-old, finds herself drawn into a Resistance group in Carcassonne - codenamed 'Citadel' - made up of ordinary women who are prepared to risk everything for what is right. And when she meets Raoul, they discover a shared passion for the cause, [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Chateau On The Lake by Charlotte Betts](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-chateau-on-the-lake-by-charlotte-betts/) - 1792. As a teacher at her parents' Academy for Young Ladies in the heart of London, Madeleine Moreau has lived her life sheltered from the outside world. But on the night of a dazzling Masquerade, tragedy strikes and she is left alone in the world [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Beware This Boy by Maureen Jennings](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-beware-this-boy-by-maureen-jennings/) - November, 1940. Tom Tyler, Detective Inspector of the small Shropshire town of Whitchurch, is a troubled man. The preceding summer had been a dark one for Britain, and even darker for Tom's own family and personal life. So he jumps [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-an-isolated-incident-by-emily-maguire/) - When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella's beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-spear-of-summer-grass-by-deanna-raybourn/) - Paris, 1923 The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even amongst Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savannah manor house until gossip [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-skinful-of-shadows-by-frances-hardinge/) - This is the story of a bear-hearted girl . . . Sometimes, when a person dies, their spirit goes looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space within them, perfect for hiding. Twelve-year-old Makepeace has learned to defend herself from the ghosts which try to possess her in the night, desperate for refuge, but one day a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Ring Through Time by Felicity Pulman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-ring-through-time-by-felicity-pulman/) - Alice Bennett has moved to Norfolk Island with her family who are descended from John Bennett, last commandant of the Second Settlement of the penal colony that was established on the island in the 19th century.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-honeybee-heart-has-five-openings-by-helen-jukes/) - A fascinating, insightful and inspiring account of a novice beekeeper's year of keeping honeybees, which will appeal to readers of H is For Hawk and The Outrun. Entering her thirties, Helen Jukes feels trapped in an urban grind of office politics and temporary addresses – disconnected, stressed. Struggling to settle into her latest job and home in Oxford,
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:  Teacher by Gabbie Stroud](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-teacher-by-gabbie-stroud/) - In 2014, Gabrielle Stroud was a very dedicated teacher with over a decade of experience. Months later, she resigned in frustration and despair when she realised that the Naplan-test education model was stopping her from doing the very thing she was best at: teaching [...]
- [VINGTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vingtage-book-review-frenchmans-creek-by-daphne-du-maurier/) - Bored and restless in London's Restoration Court, Lady Dona escapes into the British countryside with her restlessness and thirst for adventure as her only guides. Eventually Dona lands in remote Navron, looking for peace of mind [...]
- [The Summer Bride by Anne Gracie](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-summer-bride-by-anne-gracie/) - Fiercely independent Daisy Chance has a dream—and it doesn’t involve marriage or babies (or being under any man’s thumb). Raised in poverty, she has a passion—and a talent—for making beautiful clothes. Daisy aims to become the finest dressmaker in London.
- [The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-left-handed-booksellers-of-london-by-garth-nix/) - In a slightly alternate London in 1983, Susan Arkshaw is looking for her father, a man she has never met. Crime boss Frank Thringley might be able to help her, but Susan doesn’t get time to ask Frank any questions before he is turned to dust [...]
- [THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST: Eight-year-old readers tell me what they think](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-impossible-quest-eight-year-old-readers-tell-me-what-they-think/) - Dear Kate I am the teacher of a year 3-4 class in a small rural school, just outside Hamilton, in New Zealand. I picked up a copy of Book 1, The Impossible Quest - Escape from Wolfhaven Castle at a literacy conference in 2013. I returned to school and immediately read it to my class.
- [The Harp of Kings by Juliet Marillier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-harp-of-kings-by-juliet-marillier/) - A young woman is both a bard--and a warrior--in this thrilling historical fantasy from the author of the Sevenwaters novels. Eighteen-year-old Liobhan is a powerful singer and an expert whistle player. Her brother has a voice to melt the hardest heart, and a rare talent on the harp. But Liobhan's burning ambition is to join the elite warrior band [...]
- [The fascinating story of the woman who wrote Australia's first children's book (my great-great-great-grandmother)](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-fascinating-story-of-the-woman-who-wrote-australias-first-childrens-book-my-great-great-great-grandmother/) - Last week I did an hour-long interview with Richard Fidler on his hugely popular ABC Radio Show 'Conversations' (click the link to listen to the whole interview). Among other things, I spoke about my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Charlotte Waring Atkinson, who wrote the first children's book published in Australia. I have had such a huge response from the
- [The Crimson Thread](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-crimson-thread/) - On the 12th July 2018, at five o’clock in the evening, I wrote in my journal: “I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a book set in the Greek resistance during WWII & our trip to Greece next year seems like a good chance to research it … today, looking for something else, I
- [The Crimson Thread](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-crimson-thread-2/) - For the past three years, I have been working on a novel called The Crimson Thread, a reimagining of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth myth set in Crete during the Second World War [...]
- [THE BLUE ROSE: I've started writing the new novel](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-blue-rose-ive-started-writing-the-new-novel/) - I've begun writing my new novel, The Blue Rose. it's always really thrilling to start putting words down. I've been thinking and planning and day-dreaming this novel for about three months now (I began work on it on Sunday 23rd July, on the night of the new moon). For those of you who have not
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Visiting the Bronte Vicarage at Haworth](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-visiting-the-bronte-vicarage-at-haworth/) - On my website I have a page called The 50/50 Project, where I have listed the 50 things I still wish to do in my life. No 11 on the list is "See where the Bronte sisters grew up and wrote their books". "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte, "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' by Anne Bronte
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: The Great Wall of China](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-the-great-wall-of-china/) - I have always wanted to go to China and see the Great Wall, and last year I finally had to opportunity to do so, as I travelled to Beijing and Inner Mongolia to undertake research for my novel The Blue Rose. In this novel, my Welsh gardener David travels to China as part of the British
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Standing under a waterfall](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-standing-under-a-waterfall/) - I have a secret page on my website that only those that search carefully can find. I call it The 50/50 Project ... It is a list of all my hopes and dreams - both possible and impossible - & all the places I hope to one day go and all the things I hope
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Seeing Uluru at sunset](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-seeing-uluru-at-sunset/) - This year I had a significant birthday, and so I drew up a list of fifty dreams, ambitions and desires that I call THE 50/50 PROJECT (I guess that gives away what kind of significant birthday I endured!) The list is not static - as I think of new things I badly want to do, I add
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: My pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson’s house](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-50-50-project-my-pilgrimage-to-emily-dickinsons-house/) - I have a page on my website I call The 50/50 project. It’s a list of 50 things I want to do before I die (though some of them are most unlikely to happen!) I’m gradually ticking things off. In late June 2017, I managed to make one lifelong dream come true:
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: My new red convertible!](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-my-new-red-convertible/) - Next year I have a significant birthday, and so I have drawn up a list of fifty dreams, ambitions and desires that I call THE 50/50 PROJECT (I guess that gives away what kind of significant birthday I am facing!) The list is not static - as I think of new things I badly want to do,
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Flying in a helicopter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-flying-in-a-helicopter/) - It was my 50th birthday last year & so I set out to fulfill as many items on my 50/50 project as possible. You may not know about The 50/50 Project – it’s simply a list of dreams and plans and ambitions that I hope to make come true. There’s no deadline, and I probably will never achieve all
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Celebrating Midsummer's Day at a circle of stones](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-celebrating-midsummers-day-at-a-circle-of-stones/) - Something I have always wanted to do is celebrate the summer solstice at an ancient circle of stones like Stonehenge or Avebury. It’s actually No 9 on my list of things I want to do one day – I call this list my 50/50 project. I was actually in England for the summer solstice last year,
- [The 50 Authors Who Shaped Me](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-50-authors-who-shaped-me/) - It took me a long while to compile my list of “The 50 Authors who Shaped Me” – it was so difficult to choose only fifty from the thousands of authors whose work meant so much to me through my life.
- [SPOTLIGHT: The PreRaphaelite Sisterhood](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-the-preraphaelite-sisterhood/) - As many of you will know, I have spent the past few years researching and writing about the fascinating lives of some of the women in the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood for my novel Beauty in Thorns. BEAUTY IN THORNS is an historical novel for adults which tells the story of the tangled desires behind the famous painting ‘The Legend of Briar
- [SPOTLIGHT: Interview with Kate Forsyth about writing THE WITCHES OF EILEANAN](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-interview-with-kate-forsyth-about-writing-the-witches-of-eileanan/) - Twenty years ago, my first book DRAGONCLAW (called THE WITCHES OF EILEANAN in the US) was published! To celebrate, I'm running a couple of vintage posts about the writing of The Witches of Eileanan series. Today I thought I'd run an interview I gave to SFFWorld in 2000 (yes, all the years ago). Q: Your
- [SPOTLIGHT: Books That Haunt a Child Forever](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-books-that-haunt-a-child-forever/) - BOOKS THAT HAUNT A CHILD FOREVER Bertrand Russell said, ‘There are only two motives for reading a book: one, that you can enjoy it; two, that you can boast about it.’ Children, of course, rarely read a book for any other reason than enjoyment. And there really should be no other reason to read. Books
- [Pan MacMillan Speech](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/pan-macmillan-speech/) - Pan MacMillan Speech The last time I was here was to talk to you about ‘The Gypsy Crown’ and the Chain of Charms series, which was the beginning of an amazing few years for me - and for that I’d like to thank all of you at Pan Macmillan - from my wonderful publisher Claire,
- [On the Trail of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/on-the-trail-of-charlotte-rose-de-caumont-de-la-force/) - The primary character in my novel Bitter Greens is the scandalous 17th century writer, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who wrote the version of the Rapunzel fairytale that we know best [...]
- [My New Novel Announcement!](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/my-new-novel-announcement/) - I am very excited to be able to announce I have begun a new novel! It's a retelling of the ancient myth of Psyche, a haunting tale of love and loss and redemption which follows a young woman’s journey to the underworld and back
- [May Day Celebration](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/may-day-celebration/) - ‘May Day Celebration’ An extract from Dragonclaw, Kate’s first published book (The Witches of Eileanan: Book 1) One night they cantered up a steep incline to find a blaze of light and movement on the other side. A procession of torches was winding its way along the road towards her and, in a panic, Isabeau
- [INTERVIEW: SARAH BAILEY](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-sarah-bailey/) - Sarah Bailey is the Author of Into the Night, which I reviewed earlier this month. Here, she talks about her new book and the inspiration behind it.... Tell me about your new book. WHERE THE DEAD GO will be released in August and is the third book in the Detective Gemma Woodstock series. In the
- [INTERVIEW: LOUISA DEASEY](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-louisa-deasey/) - Today I am lucky enough to interview Louisa Deasey, author of A Letter from Paris: A True Story of Hidden Art, Lost Romance and Family Reclaimed: Are you a daydreamer too? Yes, sometimes, but I generally pull myself back into line and start writing lists. I wish I could daydream more. I sort of meditate
- [INTERVIEW: KATHERINE CLEMENTS](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-katherine-clements/) - Katherine Clements is the author of my latest book review The Coffin Path. Here, she tells us about her life as a writer and what she is working on next... Are you a daydreamer too? Yes. It’s part of the job! Have you always wanted to be a writer? Yes, deep down, though I didn’t start
- [INTERVIEW: Cait Duggan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-cait-duggan/) - I had the recent pleasure of interviewing Cait Duggan - read her answers to my questions below: Are you a daydreamer too? Yes! I remember my mother getting cross with me on more than one occasion as a child, telling me to get my head out of the clouds. Not much has changed since then:
- [Interview with Kate on Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-with-kate-on-fairy-tales/) - I was recently contacted by a group of college students in the US who are studying my books as part of a module on fairy tale adaptions. They are asked me some really interesting and insightful questions, and I thought I’d share my answers with you all. What's the difference between the original stories and
- [INTERVIEW WITH JANE YOLEN](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-with-jane-yolen/) - INTERVIEW WITH JANE YOLEN Jane Yolen is one of my favourite children’s authors. She moves easily between wonderful picture books like Owl Moon and How Do Dinosaurs say Tonight? to some of the most beautiful and important fiction for older readers, The Devil’s Arithmetic and Briar Rose, both of which deal with the Holocaust. She
- [Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/hidden-in-plain-view-a-secret-story-of-quilts-and-the-underground-railroad-by-jacqueline-l-tobin-and-raymond-g-dobard/) - In Hidden in Plain View, historian Jacqueline Tobin and scholar Raymond Dobard offer the first proof that certain quilt patterns, including a prominent one called the Charleston Code, were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad [...]
- [Effective Research](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/effective-research/) - I have written books set in Kent during the time of Charles II and Oliver Cromwell (The Gypsy Crown); set in Scotland during the tumultuous reign of Mary, Queen of Scots (The Puzzle Ring); in Renaissance Venice and Versailles in the time of the Sun King (Bitter Greens); in Germany during the Napoleonic wars
- [Circe by Madeline Miller](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/circe-by-madeline-miller/) - In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, [...]
- [Hoping for Troubadours](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/hoping-for-troubadours/) - When my sister Belinda and I wrote Searching for Charlotte: The Fascinating Story of Australia’s First Children’s Author, we originally planned a chapter in which we explored Charlotte Waring’s family ancestry. However, by the time we had written the book, it was too long (a very common problem!) So I reluctantly cut out the chapter
- [BOOK REVIEW:Wintering by Krissy Kneen](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewwintering-by-krissy-kneen/) - When Jessica’s partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened to him. The deserted car; the enigmatic final image on his phone [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW:The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewthe-silence-of-the-girls-by-pat-barker/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman—Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman—Briseis—watches and waits for the war's outcome. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest
- [BOOK REVIEW:The Long Call by Ann Cleeves](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewthe-long-call-by-ann-cleeves/) - In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW:The Bird in the Bamboo Cage by Hazel Gaynor](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewthe-bird-in-the-bamboo-cage-by-hazel-gaynor/) - China, 1941. Elspeth Kent has fled an unhappy life in England for a teaching post at a missionary school in northern China. But when Japan declares war on the Allies and occupies the school, security and home comforts are replaced by privation, uncertainty and fear.
- [BOOK REVIEW:Something Beautiful Happened - A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil by Yvette Manessis Corporon](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewsomething-beautiful-happened-a-story-of-survival-and-courage-in-the-face-of-evil-by-yvette-manessis-corporon/) - Seventy years after her grandmother helped hide a Jewish family on a Greek island during World War II, a woman sets out to track down their descendants—and discovers a new way to understand tragedy, forgiveness, and the power of kindness.
- [BOOK REVIEW:Fury by Kathryn Heyman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewfury-by-kathryn-heyman/) - No matter how far she travels as she hitchhikes across Australia, she can't outrun the stigma or the memories that haunt her. Sharp, sassy and determined not to be broken [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW:A Universe of Sufficient Size – Miriam Sved](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-reviewa-universe-of-sufficient-size-miriam-sved/) - Budapest, 1938. In a city park, five young Jewish mathematicians gather to share ideas, trade proofs and whisper sedition. Sydney, 2007. Illy has just buried her father, a violent, unpredictable man whose bitterness she never understood. And now Illy's mother has gifted her a curious notebook, its pages a mix of personal story
- [BOOK REVIEW: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-zorba-the-greek-by-nikos-kazantzakis/) - The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest. Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator’s lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/wild-a-journey-from-lost-to-found-by-cheryl-strayed/) - At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-whose-body-and-clouds-of-witness-by-dorothy-l-sayers/) - The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder -- especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes. What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Where The Dead Go by Sarah Bailey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-where-the-dead-go-by-sarah-bailey/) - A fifteen-year-old girl has gone missing after a party in the middle of the night. The following morning her boyfriend is found brutally murdered in his home. Was the girl responsible for the murder, or is she also a victim of the killer? But who would want two teenagers dead? The aftermath of a personal tragedy finds police detective Gemma Woodstock in the coastal town of Fairhaven with her son Ben in tow [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-where-the-crawdads-sing-by-delia-owens/) - For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her. But Kya is not what they say. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-when-breath-becomes-air-by-paul-kalanithi/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth
- [BOOK REVIEW: Vita & Virginia by Sarah Gristwood](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-vita-virginia-by-sarah-gristwood/) - Virginia Woolf is one of the world’s most famous writers, and a leading light of literary modernism and feminism. During the 1920s she had a passionate affair with a fellow author, Vita Sackville-West, and they remained friends until Virginia’s death in 1941 [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Van Gogh's Ear: The True Story - Bernadette Murphy](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-van-goghs-ear-the-true-story-bernadette-murphy/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night? In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Uprooted by Naomi Novik](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-uprooted-by-naomi-novik/) - Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Two Owls at Eton: A True Story by Jonathan Franklin](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-two-owls-at-eton-a-true-story-by-jonathan-franklin/) - When Jonathan Franklin takes two baby tawny owls back to Eton, he has no idea how chaotic the following months will be. The birds show no respect for Etonian routine and tradition. They trash his room and rule his daily life, and are known throughout the school as 'Dum' and 'Dee' [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Tombland by C J Sansom](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-tombland-by-c-j-sansom/) - Blurb (from Goodreads): Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos ... The nominal king, Edward VI, is eleven years old. His uncle Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Protector. The extirpation of the old religion by radical Protestants is stirring discontent among the populace while the Protector's
- [BOOK REVIEW: Tolkien & C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship by Colin Duriez](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-tolkien-c-s-lewis-the-gift-of-friendship-by-colin-duriez/) - Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are literary superstars, known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the important and complex friendship between Tolkien and his fellow Oxford academic C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the
- [BOOK REVIEW: Tidelands by Philippa Gregory](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/tidelands-by-philippa-gregory/) - Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast. Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-three-women-by-lisa-taddeo/) - We begin in suburban Indiana with Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. She passes her days cooking and cleaning for a man who refuses to kiss her on the mouth, protesting that “the sensation offends” him. To Lina’s horror, even her marriage counselor says her husband’s position [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku by Natalie Goldberg](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-three-simple-lines-a-writers-pilgrimage-into-the-heart-and-homeland-of-haiku-by-natalie-goldberg/) - A haiku is three simple lines. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg put it, three lines that "make the mind leap." A good one, he said, lets the mind experience "a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God."[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-threads-of-life-a-history-of-the-world-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-by-clare-hunter/) - In 1970s Argentina, mothers marched in headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. In Tudor, England, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was under house arrest, her needlework [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Yield by Tara June Winch](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-yield-by-tara-june-winch/) - Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Warsaw Orphan by Kelly Rimmer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-warsaw-orphan-by-kelly-rimmer/) - In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. She has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Viennese Girl by Jenny Lecoat](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-viennese-girl-by-jenny-lecoat/) - Inspired by the true story of a young Jewish girl - Hedy Bercu - who fled to Jersey from Vienna only to find herself trapped on the island during the German occupation. In June 1940, the horror-struck inhabitants of Jersey watch as the German army unopposed [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-vanishing-act-of-esme-lennox-by-maggie-ofarrell/) - In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Tides Between by Elizabeth Jane Corbett](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-tides-between-by-elizabeth-jane-corbett/) - In the year 1841, on the eve of her departure from London, Bridie's mother demands she forget her dead father and prepare for a sensible adult life in Port Phillip. Desperate to save her childhood, fifteen-year-old Bridie is determined to smuggle a notebook filled with her father's fairy tales to the far side of the world [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-things-we-cannot-say-by-kelly-rimmer/) - In 1942, Europe remains in the relentless grip of war. Just beyond the tents of the Russian refugee camp she calls home, a young woman speaks her wedding vows. It’s a decision that will alter her destiny…and it’s a lie that will remain buried until the next century. Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Survivors by Jane Harper](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-survivors-by-jane-harper/) - Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home. Kieran's parents are struggling in a town [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-story-keeper-by-anna-mazzola/) - Audrey Hart is on the Isle of Skye to collect the word-of-mouth folk tales of the people and communities around her. It is 1857, the Highland Clearances have left devastation and poverty, and the crofters are suspicious and hostile, claiming they no longer know their stories [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-song-of-achilles-by-madeline-miller/) - Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. By all rights their paths should never cross, but Achilles takes the shamed prince as his friend, and as they grow into young men skilled [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-silent-patient-by-alex-michaelides/) - Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-secret-garden-by-frances-hodgson-burnett/) - The plot centers round Mary Lennox, a young English girl who returns to England from India, having suffered the immense trauma by losing both her parents in a cholera epidemic. However, her memories of her parents are not pleasant, as they were a selfish, neglectful and pleasure-seeking couple. Mary is given to the [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-scholar-by-dervla-mctiernan/) - When DS Cormac Reilly’s girlfriend Emma stumbles across the victim of a hit and run early one morning, he is first on the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him. The dead girl is carrying an ID, that of Carline Darcy, heir apparent to Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland’s most successful pharmaceutical company. Darcy Therapeutics has a finger in every pie, from sponsoring university
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Rose Code by Kate Quinn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-rose-code-by-kate-quinn/) - 1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The River Wife by Heather Rose](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-river-wife-by-heather-rose/) - This is the story of a river and the making of water and the nature of love. Some would say that any story of water is always a story of magic, and others would say any story of love was the same …’ The River Wife is a simple and subtle story of love. The river wife—part human, part fish—has a duty to tend the river [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Ride Of A Lifetime by Robert Iger](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-ride-of-a-lifetime-by-robert-iger/) - In 2005, Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was more intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. "I knew there was nothing to be gained from arguing over the past," Iger writes. "The only thing that mattered [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-red-tent-by-anita-diamant/) - Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-reading-cure-how-books-restored-my-appetite-by-laura-freeman/) - At the age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. She had seized the one aspect of her life that she seemed able to control, and struck different foods from her diet one by one until she was starving. But even at her lowest point, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Quality Of Silence by Rosamund Lupton](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-quality-of-silence-by-rosamund-lupton/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): On 24 November Yasmin and her ten-year-old daughter Ruby set off on a journey across Northern Alaska. They're searching for Ruby's father, missing in the arctic wilderness. More isolated with each frozen mile they cover, they travel deeper into an endless night. And Ruby, deaf since birth, must brave the darkness
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Praise Singer by Mary Renault](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-praise-singer-by-mary-renault/) - In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-penelopiad-by-margaret-atwood/) - In Homer’s account in The Odyssey, Penelope—wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy—is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife, her story a salutary lesson through the ages. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War after the abduction of Helen [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-nine-tailors-by-dorothy-sayers/) - When a disfigured corpse is discovered in a country parish, the local rector pleads with Lord Peter to take on what will become one of his most brilliant and complicated cases.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-museum-of-words-by-georgia-blain/) - In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry [...]
- [Book Review: The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson](https://kateforsyth.com.au/uncategorized/book-review-the-mighty-dead-why-homer-matters-by-adam-nicolson/) - In this passionate, deeply personal book, Adam Nicolson explains why Homer matters - to him, to you, to the world - in a text full of twists, turns and surprises.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Merry-be-Got by Julie Hearn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-merry-be-got-by-julie-hearn/) - In a remote west-country village, all is not as it seems. The minister's daughters have taken to their bed, howling and spitting pins. Rumours of bad magic and ill-wishing are spreading fast—and fingers are pointing at Nell, the cunning woman's granddaughter.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Lost Summers of Driftwood by Vanessa McCausland](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-lost-summers-of-driftwood-by-vanessa-mccausland/) - Is it more dangerous to forget ... or to remember? A compelling drama about broken dreams, first love and the mystery of a lost sister, for all fans of Hannah Richell and Kate Morton. She remembered this part of the trip during the day time. Her sisters on either side in the back [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Lost Man - Jane Harper](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-lost-man-jane-harper/) - Two brothers meet at the border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of outback Queensland, in this stunning new standalone novel from New York Times bestseller Jane Harper.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Library A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-library-a-catalogue-of-wonders-by-stuart-kells/) - Libraries are filled with magic. From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of middle earth, Umberto Eco’s mediaeval library labyrinth and libraries dreamed up by John Donne, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Ruiz Zafón [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers by Kerri Turner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-last-days-of-the-romanov-dancers-by-kerri-turner/) - Valentina Yershova's position in the Romanov's Imperial Russian Ballet is the only thing that keeps her from the clutches of poverty. With implacable determination, she has clawed her way through the ranks to soloist, utilising not only her talent [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Last Balfour by Cait Duggan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-last-balfour-by-cait-duggan/) - Iona Balfour's life is turned upside down when her beloved aunt Grizel is executed for the crime of witchcraft. Before she dies, Grizel appoints Iona as guardian of a precious family bloodstone and tells her she must flee their village and deliver the stone to the mysterious Guild of the Green Lion[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-lantern-men-by-elly-griffiths/) - Everything has changed for Dr Ruth Galloway. She has a new job, home and partner, and is no longer North Norfolk police's resident forensic archaeologist. That is, until convicted murderer Amyas March offers to make DCI Nelson a deal [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The King Must Die by Mary Renault](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-king-must-die-by-mary-renault/) - In myth, Theseus was the slayer of the child-devouring Minotaur in Crete. What the founder-hero might have been in real life is another question, brilliantly explored in The King Must Die. Drawing on modern scholarship and archaeological findings at Knossos, Mary Renault’s Theseus is an utterly lifelike figure—a king of immense charisma, whose boundless strivings flow from strength and weakness
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Joy of High Places by Patti Miller](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-joy-of-high-places-by-patti-miller/) - A soaring memoir of longing, resilience and delight in the natural world. In this extraordinary and unexpected book, Patti tells the story of her own long-distance walking over hundreds of kilometres in Europe and of her brother’s obsession with paragliding. As adults, a tragic accident changes their relationship. One day, Barney’s wing [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Island by Victoria Hislop](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-island-by-victoria-hislop/) - On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Huntress by Kate Quinn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-huntress-by-kate-quinn/) - In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted…Bold, reckless Nina Markova grows up on the icy edge of Soviet Russia, dreaming of flight and fearing nothing. When the tide of war sweeps over her homeland, she gambles everything to join the infamous Night Witches,
- [BOOK REVIEW: The House Of Dreams by Kate Lord Brown](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-house-of-dreams-by-kate-lord-brown/) - In 2000, Gabriel Lambert is a celebrated painter who hides a dark secret. Sophie Cass, a journalist struggling to begin her career and with a family connection to Lambert, is determined to find the truth about his past and the little known story of the real Casablanca [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-hazel-wood-by-melissa-albert/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Guardian of Lies by Kate Furnivall](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-guardian-of-lies-by-kate-furnivall/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Discover a brilliant story of love, danger, courage and betrayal, from the internationally bestselling author of The Survivors. 1953, the South of France. The fragile peace between the West and Soviet Russia hangs on a knife edge. And one family has been torn apart by secrets and conflicting allegiances. Eloïse Caussade is a
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-good-turn-by-dervla-mctiernan/) - Police corruption, an investigation that ends in tragedy and the mystery of a little girl's silence - three unconnected things that will prove to be linked by one small town. While Detective Cormac Reilly faces enemies at work [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Golden Egg by Donna Leon](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-golden-egg-by-donna-leon/) - In The Golden Egg, as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Brunetti to look into a minor shop-keeping violation committed by the mayor's future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but he has little choice but to comply [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-glass-castle-by-jeannette-walls/) - A tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that, despite its profound flaws, gave the author the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms. Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads,
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-giver-of-stars-by-jojo-moyes/) - Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Girl Remains by Katherine Firkin](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-girl-remains-by-katherine-firkin/) - A chilling police thriller set in a small coastal town on the Mornington Peninsula, where the discovery of human bones on an isolated beach has reawakened a twenty-year-old cold case…On the evening of September 22, 1998, three teenage girls venture out for a night of mischief [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The French Photographer by Natasha Lester](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-french-photographer-by-natasha-lester/) - Manhattan, Paris, 1942: When Jessica May's successful modelling career is abruptly cut short, she is assigned to the war in Europe as a photojournalist for Vogue. But when she arrives the army men make her life as difficult as possible. Three friendships change that: journalist Martha Gellhorn [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Fragments by Toni Jordan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-fragments-by-toni-jordan/) - INGA Karlson died in a fire in New York in the 1930s, leaving behind three things: a phenomenally successful first novel, the scorched fragments of a second book— and a mystery that has captivated generations of readers. Nearly fifty years later, Brisbane bookseller Caddie Walker is waiting in line to see a [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant by Kayte Nunn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-forgotten-letters-of-esther-durrant-by-kayte-nunn/) - The Blurb: A cache of unsent love letters from the 1950s is found in a suitcase on a remote island in this mysterious love story by top ten bestselling author, Kayte Nunn 1951. Esther Durrant, a young mother, is committed to an isolated mental asylum by her husband. Run by a pioneering psychiatrist, the hospital
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-erratics-by-vicki-laveau-harvie/) - When her elderly mother is hospitalised after an accident, Vicki is summoned to her parents' isolated and run-down ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to care for her father. She has been estranged from her parents for many years (the reasons for which become quickly clear) and is horrified by what she discovers on her arrival[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The English Wife by Lauren Willig](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-english-wife-by-lauren-willig/) - Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life: he’s the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor manor in England, they had a whirlwind romance in London, they have three year old twins on whom they dote
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Dollmaker of Kraków by R.M. Romero](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-dollmaker-of-krakow-by-r-m-romero/) - In the land of dolls, there is magic. In the land of humans, there is war. Everywhere there is pain. But together there is hope. Karolina is a living doll whose king and queen have been overthrown [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Charleston Scandal by Pamela Hart](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-charleston-scandal-by-pamela-hart/) - London, 1920s: Kit Scott, a privileged young Australian aiming to become a star, arrives in the city to find the Jazz Age in full swing. Cast in a West End play opposite another young hopeful, Canadian Zeke Gardiner, she dances blithely into the heady lifestyle [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-bull-from-the-sea-by-mary-renault/) - In this sequel to The King Must Die Theseus defies the Gods’ and claims the throne of Athens a move that culminates in the terrible, fateful destruction of the house of Minos -- the Minotaur.
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Blue by Nancy Bilyeau](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-blue-by-nancy-bilyeau/) - In eighteenth century London, porcelain is the most seductive of commodities; fortunes are made and lost upon it. Kings do battle with knights and knaves for possession of the finest pieces and the secrets of their manufacture. For Genevieve Planché, an English-born descendant of Huguenot refugees, porcelain [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Binding by Bridget Collins](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-binding-by-bridget-collins/) - Imagine you could erase grief. Imagine you could remove pain. Imagine you could hide the darkest, most horrifying secret. Forever. Young Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a strange letter arrives summoning him away from his family. He is to begin an apprenticeship as a Bookbinder[....]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-bean-trees-by-barbara-kingsolver/) - Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Take Courage: Anne Bronte And The Art Of Life by Samantha Ellis](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-take-courage-anne-bronte-and-the-art-of-life-by-samantha-ellis/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Anne Brontë is the forgotten Brontë sister, overshadowed by her older siblings -- virtuous, successful Charlotte, free-spirited Emily and dissolute Branwell. Tragic, virginal, sweet, stoic, selfless, Anne. The less talented Brontë, the other Brontë. Or that's what Samantha Ellis, a life-long Emily and Wuthering Heights devotee, had always thought. Until, that is, she started questioning
- [BOOK REVIEW: Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-strong-poison-by-dorothy-l-sayers/) - Mystery novelist Harriet Vane knew all about poisons, and when her former lover died in the manner prescribed in one of her books, a jury of her peers had a hangman's noose in mind. But Lord Peter Wimsey was determined to find her innocent.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Still Life by Sarah Winman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-still-life-by-sarah-winman/) - Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Staying by Jessie Cole](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-staying-by-jessie-cole/) - As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Star-Crossed by Minnie Darke](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-star-crossed-by-minnie-darke/) - Sometimes even destiny needs a little bit of help. When childhood sweethearts Justine (Sagittarius and serious skeptic) and Nick (Aquarius and true believer) bump into each other as adults, a life-changing love affair seems inevitable. To Justine, anyway. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-spinning-silver-by-naomi-novik/) - Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders... but her father isn't a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has loaned out most of his wife's dowry and left the family on the edge of poverty--until Miryem steps in.Hardening her heart against her fellow villagers' pleas, she sets out to collect what is owed--and finds herself more than up to the task.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Songwoman by Ilka Tampke](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-songwoman-by-ilka-tampke/) - Haunted by the Roman attack that destroyed her home, Ailia flees to the remote Welsh mountains in search of the charismatic war king, Caradog, who is leading a guerrilla campaign against the encroaching army. Ailia proves herself an indispensable advisor to the war king, but as the bond between them deepens [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Skin by Ilka Tampke](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-skin-by-ilka-tampke/) - For the people of Caer Cad, ‘skin’ is their totem, their greeting, their ancestors, their land. Ailia does not have skin. Abandoned at birth, she serves the Tribequeen of her township. Ailia is not permitted to marry, excluded from tribal ceremonies and, most devastatingly, forbidden to learn [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Sisters of the Resistance by Christine Wells](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-sisters-of-the-resistance-by-christine-wells/) - France, 1944: The Nazis still occupy Paris, and twenty-five-year-old Gabby Foucher hates these enemies, though, as the concierge of ten rue Royale, she makes it a point to avoid trouble, unlike her sister Yvette [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Shiver by Allie Reynolds](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-shiver-by-allie-reynolds/) - They don't know what I did. And I intend to keep it that way. How far would you go to win? Hyper-competitive people, mind games and a dangerous natural environment combine to make the must-read thriller of the year. Fans of Lucy Foley [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Searching For Sappho: The Lost Songs & World Of The First Woman Poet by Philip Freeman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-searching-for-sappho-the-lost-songs-world-of-the-first-woman-poet-by-philip-freeman/) - For more than twenty-five centuries, all that the world knew of the poems of Sappho—the first woman writer in literary history—were a few brief quotations preserved by ancient male authors. Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Ransom by David Malouf](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-ransom-by-david-malouf/) - A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature-Achilles's slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam's attempt to ransom his son's body in Homer's "The Iliad"-Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade from David Malouf [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Pierre’s Not There by Ursula Dubosarsky](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-pierres-not-there-by-ursula-dubosarsky/) - Lara had always wished she was a dog, and one day, just for a short time, she actually became one. This is how it happened. In a mulberry brick house on the harbour that Lara explores while her mother cleans, Lara meets Pierre, a boy about her age with a beautiful antique puppet [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Phosphorescence by Julia Baird](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-phosphorescence-by-julia-baird/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Over the last decade, we have become better at knowing what brings us contentment, well-being and joy. We know, for example, that there are a few core truths to science of happiness. We know that being kind and altruistic makes us happy, that turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships,
- [BOOK REVIEW: Only Happiness Here – In search of Elizabeth von Arnim by Gabrielle Carey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-only-happiness-here-in-search-of-elizabeth-von-arnim-by-gabrielle-carey/) - Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the early twentieth century’s most famous – and almost forgotten – authors. She was ahead of her time in her understanding of women and their often thwarted pursuit of happiness. Born in Sydney [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: One Enchanted Evening by Charlotte Smith](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-one-enchanted-evening-by-charlotte-smith/) - The Blurb (from Booktopia) Every woman has a dress that reminds her of one unforgettable evening … Charlotte Smith owns literally thousands. Having lived life to the full in London, Paris and New York, when she settled in Australia she inherited a [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/once-we-were-sisters-sheila-kohler/) - When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: On Mazes & Labyrinths by Charlotte Higgins](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-on-mazes-labyrinths-by-charlotte-higgins/) - The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne’s ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth – the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-mythos-the-greek-myths-retold-by-stephen-fry/) - The Greek myths are the greatest stories ever told, passed down through millennia and inspiring writers and artists as varied as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, James Joyce and Walt Disney. They are embedded deeply in the traditions, tales and cultural DNA of the West. In Stephen Fry's hands the stories [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Marriage of Convenience Series by Anne Gracie](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-marriage-of-convenience-series-by-anne-grace/) - Major Calbourne Rutherford returns to England on the trail of an assassin, only to find he’s become Lord Ashendon, with the responsibility for vast estates and dependent relatives. Cal can command [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Love or Nearest Offer by Adele Geras](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-love-or-nearest-offer-by-adele-geras/) - What if your estate agent could find you not just your perfect house, but your perfect job, your perfect partner... your perfect new life? On paper, Iris Atkins is an estate agent, but she's not just good at finding suitable houses for her clients.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Lisette’s List by Susan Vreeland](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-lisettes-list-by-susan-vreeland/) - In 1937, young Lisette Roux and her husband, André, move from Paris to a village in Provence to care for André’s grandfather Pascal. Lisette regrets having to give up her dream of becoming a gallery apprentice and longs for [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Lenny's Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-lennys-book-of-everything-by-karen-foxlee/) - Lenny, small and sharp, has a younger brother Davey who won't stop growing - and at seven is as tall as a man. Raised by their single mother, who works two jobs and is made almost entirely out of worries, they have food and a roof over their heads, but not much else.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Josephine's Garden by Stephanie Parkyn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-josephines-garden-by-stephanie-parkyn/) - France, 1794. In the aftermath of the bloody end to the French Revolution, Rose de Beauharnais stumbles from prison on the day she is to be guillotined. Within a decade, she'll transform into the scandalous socialite who marries Napoleon Bonaparte, become Empress Josephine of France [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-jane-austen-at-home-by-lucy-worsley/) - On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the rooms from which our best-loved novelist quietly changed the world. This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: J.M. Barrie & The Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-j-m-barrie-the-lost-boys-the-real-story-behind-peter-pan-by-andrew-birkin/) - J. M. Barrie, Victorian novelist, playwright, and author of Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, led a life almost as magical and interesting as as his famous creation. Childless in his marriage, Barrie grew close to the five young boys of the Llewelyn Davies family, ultimately becoming their guardian and devoted surrogate father when they were orphaned.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Into the World by Stephanie Parkyn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-into-the-world-by-stephanie-parkyn/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): In the midst of the French Revolution, in 1791, unwed mother Marie-Louise Girardin takes one last look at her baby son before thrusting him into the arms of her friend, the revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Into The Night by Sarah Bailey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-into-the-night-by-sarah-bailey/) - After the shocking murder of a high-profile celebrity, Gemma Woodstock must pull back the layers of a gilded cage to discover who among the victim's friends and family can be trusted--and who may be the killer. Troubled and brilliant, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock finds herself lost and alone after a recent move to Melbourne, brokenhearted by the decisions she's had to make.
- [BOOK REVIEW: I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-i-am-i-am-i-am-seventeen-brushes-with-death-by-maggie-ofarrell/) - We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death. I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year,
- [BOOK REVIEW: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-howls-moving-castle-by-diana-wynne-jones/) - Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Hearing Maud by Jessica White](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-hearing-maud-by-jessica-white/) - I love creative non-fiction, particularly when it weaves personal memoir with an in-depth examination of some aspect of human culture. And I’ve been interested in deafness and sign language ever since reading about Helen Keller as a child. So as soon as I heard about this book, I knew I was interested in reading it [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-hamnet-by-maggie-ofarrell/) - Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-half-the-perfect-world-writers-dreamers-and-drifters-on-hydra-1955-1964-by-paul-genoni-and-tanya-dalziell/) - Half the Perfect World is an account of the expatriate artist community on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. Fostered by celebrated Australian literary couple Charmian Clift and George Johnston [....]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Gulliver's Wife by Lauren Chater](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-gullivers-wife-by-lauren-chater/) - London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-gaudy-night-by-dorothy-l-sayers/) - The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Gone By Midnight by Candice Fox](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-gone-by-midnight-by-candice-fox/) - On the fifth floor of the White Caps Hotel, four young boys are left alone while their parents dine downstairs. But when one of the parents checks on the children at midnight, they discover one of them is missing. The boys swear they stayed in their room. CCTV confirms that none of them [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-elizabeth-and-her-german-garden-by-elizabeth-von-arnim/) - "Elizabeth and Her German Garden," a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, was popular and frequently reprinted during the early years of the 20th century. "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" is a year's diary written by Elizabeth about her experiences learning gardening and interacting with her friends.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-eleanor-oliphant-is-completely-fine-by-gail-honeyman/) - Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-eggshell-skull-by-bri-lee/) - EGGSHELL SKULL: A well-established legal doctrine that a defendant must 'take their victim as they find them'. If a single punch kills someone because of their thin skull, that victim's weakness cannot mitigate the seriousness of the crime. But what if it also works the other way?
- [BOOK REVIEW: Educated by Tara Westover](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-educated-by-tara-westover/) - Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Diving for Seahorses by Hilde Ostby & Ylva Ostby](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-diving-for-seahorses-by-hilde-ostby-ylva-ostby/) - Diving for Seahorses answers these questions and more, offering an illuminating look at one of our most fascinating faculties: our memory. Sisters Hilde and Ylva Østby – one an acclaimed writer the other a neuropsychologist—skilfully interweave history, research and personal stories in this fascinating exploration [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Dinner with the Schnabels by Toni Jordan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-dinner-with-the-schnabels-by-toni-jordan/) - Things haven't gone well for Simon Larsen lately. He adores his wife, Tansy, and his children, but since his business failed and he lost the family home, he can't seem to get off the couch. Simon is permanently unemployed [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Devotion by Hannah Kent](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-devotion-by-hannah-kent/) - Prussia, 1836. Hanne is nearly fifteen and the domestic world of womanhood is quickly closing in on her. A child of nature, she yearns instead for the rush of the river, the wind dancing around her. [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Dead Man Switch by Tara Moss](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-dead-man-switch-by-tara-moss/) - Sydney, 1946. Billie Walker is living life on her own terms. World War II has left her bereaved, her photojournalist husband missing and presumed dead. Determined not to rely on any man for her future, she re-opens her late father's detective agency. Billie's bread and butter is tailing cheating spouses - it's easy, pays the bills and she has a knack for it. B
- [BOOK REVIEW: Daffodil: Biography of a Flower by Helen O'Neill](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-daffodil-biography-of-a-flower-by-helen-oneill/) - A beautifully illustrated, visually lush and intriguing book about the world's most popular and most powerful flower. The daffodil is the beautiful first flower of spring, the inspiration of poets, a treasure-trove to scientists and a symbol of everything from unrequited love, [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-cuckoo-song-by-frances-hardinge/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): The first things to shift were the doll's eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss's face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak. 'Who do you think you are? This is my family.' When Triss wakes up after an accident, she
- [BOOK REVIEW: Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-code-name-helene-by-ariel-lawhon/) - This book is based on the life of Nancy Wake, an Australian expat who worked as a reporter for Hearst in Paris just before WWII and later as a spy for the British. Lawhon throws readers into the middle of the action, as Nancy, under the alias Hélène [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: By Sea & Stars: The Story of the First Fleet by Trent Dalton](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-by-sea-stars-the-story-of-the-first-fleet-by-trent-dalton/) - Dazzling, poetic and vivid storytelling from one of Australia's greatest writers, which tells the bloody, brutal and enthralling story of the epic journey of the First Fleet. Originally published as a multi-part serial in The Australian, By Sea and Stars tells the story of the epic voyage which led to the founding of our nation [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Butterfly on A Pin by Alannah Hill](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-butterfly-on-a-pin-by-alannah-hill/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): Unflinching, funny, shocking, inspiring and tender: this is a story like no other. Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was
- [BOOK REVIEW: Brimstone (The Fire Watcher Chronicles #1) by Kelly Gardiner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-brimstone-the-fire-watcher-chronicles-1-by-kelly-gardiner/) - December 1940: Christopher Larkham finds an ancient Roman ring inscribed with a phoenix on the banks of the Thames. As he takes shelter from the firestorm of the Blitz, the ring glows, and pushing open a door, he finds himself in 1666 and facing [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-brideshead-revisited-by-evelyn-waugh/) - The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuationwith the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Blackberry & Wild Rose by Sonia Velton](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-blackberry-wild-rose-by-sonia-velton/) - When Esther Thorel, the wife of a Huguenot silk-weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks she is doing God’s will. Sara is not convinced being a maid is better than being a whore, but the chance to escape her grasping ‘madam’ is too good to refuse.[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Black Spring by Alison Croggon](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-black-spring-by-alison-croggan/) - In a savage land sustained by wizardry and ruled by vendetta, Lina is the enchanting but willful daughter of a village lord. She and her childhood companion, Damek, have grown up privileged and spoiled, and they’re devoted to each other to the point of obsession. But Lina’s violet eyes
- [BOOK REVIEW: Barbed Wire & Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-barbed-wire-cherry-blossoms-by-anita-heiss/) - 5 August, 1944: Over 1000 Japanese soldiers attempt to break out of the No. 12 Prisoner of War compound on the fringes of Cowra. In the carnage, hundreds are killed, many are recaptured and imprisoned, and some take their own lives rather than suffer the humiliation of ongoing defeat. But one soldier, Hiroshi, determined to avoid either fate, manages to escape [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Angel of Ruin by Kim Wilkins](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-angel-of-ruin-by-kim-wilkins/) - Sophie needs to pay the rent and a story on the occult would sell around Hallowe'en time. The Lodge of the Seven Stars is good for research but Sophie's a sceptic and doesn't believe in any of the rituals. Until she meets The Wanderer who has a story to tell her.
- [BOOK REVIEW: Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and The Mystery of Consciousness by Kate Cole-Adams](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-anaesthesia-the-gift-of-oblivion-and-the-mystery-of-consciousness-by-kate-cole-adams/) - A hundred and seventy years ago many people would have chosen to die rather than undergo the ordeal of surgery. Today, even major operations are routine. Anaesthesia has made them possible. But how much do we really know about what happens when we go under?
- [BOOK REVIEW: An Odyssey: A Father, A Son & An Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-an-odyssey-a-father-a-son-an-epic-by-daniel-mendelsohn/) - When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth
- [BOOK REVIEW: Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-agnes-grey-by-anne-bronte/) - Agnes Grey is the touching story of a young girl who decides to enter the world as a governess, but whose bright illusions of acceptance, freedom and friendship are gradually destroyed. Drawing on her own experience, Anne Brontë charts the development of gentle Agnes and sympathetically depicts the harsh treatment [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: After by Nikki Gemmell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-after-by-nikki-gemmell/) - Australia's bravest and most honest writer explores the devastating aftermath of her elderly mother's decision to end her own life. Nikki Gemmell's world changed forever in October 2015 when the body of her elderly mother was found and it became clear she had decided to end her own life [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-a-spell-in-the-wild-by-alice-tarbuck/) - Witches occupy a clear place in contemporary imagination. We can see them, emerging shadowy, from the corners of the past: mad, glamorous, difficult, strange. They haunt the footnotes of history [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-a-single-thread-by-tracy-chevalier/) - Tracy Chevalier is one of my favourite writers. I find we have a lot of common interests –women’s stories, women’s art, women’s struggle. She’s one of the few authors whose books I will buy and read as a matter of course, regardless of where and when her books are set [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: A Letter from Paris: A True Story of Hidden Art, Lost Romance and Family Reclaimed by Louisa Deasey](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-a-letter-from-paris-a-true-story-of-hidden-art-lost-romance-and-family-reclaimed-by-louisa-deasey/) - When Louisa Deasey receives a message from a French woman called Coralie, who has found a cache of letters in an attic, written about Louisa's father, neither woman can imagine the events it will set in motion.
- [BOOK REVIEW: A Dance With Fate by Juliet Marillier](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-a-dance-with-fate-by-juliet-marillier/) - A young woman who is both a bard--and a warrior--seeks to repay her debts and settle scores in this thrilling historical fantasy series. The young warrior and bard Liobhan has lost her brother to the Otherworld.
- [BOOK REVIEW:  Marlene by C. W. Gortner](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-marlene-by-c-w-gortner/) - Raised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. When a budding career as a violinist is cut short, the willful teenager vows to become a singer, trading her family’s proper, middle-class society for the free-spirited [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW:  Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-flyaway-by-kathleen-jennings/) - In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers—a note that makes question her memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure. A beguiling story that proves that gothic delights and uncanny family horror can live [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW Melmoth by Sarah Perry](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-melmoth-by-sarah-perry/) - For centuries, the mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history’s darkest waters—and now, in Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, it is heading in our direction. It has been years since Helen Franklin left England.In Prague, working as a translator[...]
- [BITTER GREENS: Rapunzel, Charlotte-Rose de la Force & me](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/bitter-greens-rapunzel-charlotte-rose-de-la-force-me/) - Interview with Elizabeth Jane for the Historical Novel Society magazine I read on your website that you started out wanting to tell the Rapunzel Story as a historical novel, as if it really happened (as part of your PhD?), until, as part of your research, came across Charlotte Rose de la Force who you describe
- [Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/bila-yarrudhanggalangdhuray-by-anita-heiss/) - The powerful Murrumbidgee River surges through town leaving death and destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder that while the river can give life, it can just as easily take it away. Wagadhaany is one of the lucky ones. She survives. But is her life now better than the fate she escaped? Forced to move away from her miyagan [..]
- [BEAUTY IN THORNS: Edward Burne-Jones's Sleeping Beauty paintings](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/314/) - The National Gallery of Australia has just announced a major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art, 'Love & Desire', will open in mid-December. It's bringing out many of the Tate's masterpieces for the very first time. This is a chance for Australians to discover the extraordinary luminous art of this circle of passionate rebellious mid-Victorian artists, which
- [BEAUTY IN THORNS](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/beauty-in-thorns/) - Buy The Book The extraordinary love story behind Edward Burne-Jones’s famous ‘Sleeping Beauty’ paintings In 1890, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones finished a monumental series of paintings inspired by ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Greeted with ecstasy by the public, it sold for a record 15,000 guineas and made the artist a rich and famous man. Told by the
- [A Tale of Two Cities](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/a-tale-of-two-cities/) - A Tale of Two Cities was Charles Dickens’s twelfth novel, and was written and published at a tumultuous time of his life. He was at that time in his mid-40s, unhappily married with ten children aged between 20 and 5. He was already famous, having written such great classics [...]
- [THE 50/50 PROJECT: Winning the ALA Award for Best Historical Fiction](https://kateforsyth.com.au/kates-blog/the-50-50-project-winning-the-ala-award-for-best-historical-fiction/) - I have a secret page on my website that only those that search carefully can find. I call it The 50/50 Project ... It is a list of all my hopes and dreams - both possible and impossible - & all the places I hope to one day go and all the things I hope
- [Crimson Thread](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/crimson-thread/) - A week ago, I finished the final edit of The Crimson Thread, the book I’ve been working on for almost two-and-a-half years. It’s always a bittersweet feeling. Joy, relief, excitement, yet also grief that this story which has inhabited my imagination for so long is finally almost ready to be born. It will be released
- [AUTHOR INTERVIEW with Toni Jordan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/author-interview-with-toni-jordan/) - I first met Toni Jordan on a bus ferrying authors from our hotel to the Perth Writers Festival. We fell into conversation and afterwards I bought her book, Addition, and went along to hear her speak. She was so clever, so funny, so engaging, I’ve been a fan ever since. Her latest book, Dinner with
- [THE RULE OF THREE](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-rule-of-three/) - I often teach what is called the Rule of Three in my workshops and lectures, and thought I’d share the idea with you all. Basically, the Rule of Three is an ancient principle of storytelling in which words, characters or events occur in patterns of three. Humans are pattern-loving creatures. In fact, to be honest,
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Til We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-myth-retold-by-c-s-lewis/) - In this timeless tale of two mortal princesses- one beautiful and one unattractive- C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister [...]
- [The Wild Girl](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-wild-girl/) - THE WILD GIRL was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013 by Australian readers, and earned a starred review by the American Library Association Booklist, who called it “a beautiful and often heartbreaking love story that is sure to move and captivate readers.’ [...]
- [Newsletter August 2021](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/newsletter-august-2021/) - I have such exciting news to share with you! For the last couple of years, I have been working on a most unusual project with Wendy Sharpe, the Archibald-winning artist. Wendy has been creating art inspired by my words,[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Eurydice Street - A Place in Athens by Sofka Zinovieff](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-eurydice-street-a-place-in-athens-by-sofka-zinovieff/) - Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would, return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh [...]
- [My Fairy Tale Fascination](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/my-fairy-tale-fascination/) - My Fairy Tale Fascination I was enchanted with the Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tales from the moment I read them as a little girl, sick and lonely in hospital. I was only seven, but I still remember the transformative experience of reading the tales by myself for the first time. I had been given a copy of
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Burial Rites by Hannah Kent](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-burial-rites-by-hannah-kent/) - A brilliant literary debut, inspired by a true story: the final days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in 1829. Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal [...]
- [The Time Travel books that inspired me to write ‘The Puzzle Ring’](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-time-travel-books-that-inspired-me-to-write-the-puzzle-ring/) - I used to love reading time travel adventures when I was a child. They were one of my favourite genres of fiction, and I’ve always wanted to write one. When I first began daydreaming about the story that would become ‘The Puzzle Ring’,
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Thornspell by Helen Lowe](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-thornspell-by-helen-lowe/) - Helen Lowe reimagines the Sleeping Beauty story from the point of view of the prince who is destined to wake the enchanted princess in this lush, romantic fantasy-adventure. Prince Sigismund has grown up hearing fantastical stories about enchantments and faie spells, basilisks and dragons, knights-errant and heroic quests [...]
- [Writing In The Blood](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/writing-in-the-blood/) - We all know that we inherit the colour of our eyes from our parents. If you sneeze when you look at the sun, that too was passed down through your genes. So was your ability to curl your tongue, and when you are likely to notice that first grey hair.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Ties That Bind – Lexi Landsman](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ties-that-bind-lexi-landsman/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): The Ties That Bind is an emotionally riveting debut novel about the power of a mother's love and the bonds among family that, though severed, can never be fully broken. On opposite sides of the world, two lives are changed forever. One by the smallest bruise. The other by a devastating
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW:The Chalet School in Exile by Elinor Brent-Dyer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-reviewthe-chalet-school-in-exile-by-elinor-brent-dyer/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): When Madge Bettany decides to start a school in the Austrian Alps, little does she realize how such a small idea will so completely change her life. Now, in this classic series of books, first published in the 1920s, join the Chalet School's first pupil, Joey Bettany, as she forges strong
- [Cinderella and her Slippers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/cinderella-fur-slipper/) - Last week ABC National Radio ran an interview I did a few years ago with the wonderful Richard Fidler. I always get masses of messages and emails afterwards, many querying me about some aspect of the fascinating history of fairy tales [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Mariana by Susanna Kearsley](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-mariana-by-susanna-kearsley/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): The first time Julia Beckett saw Greywethers she was only five, but she knew that it was her house. And now that she’s at last become its owner, she suspects that she was drawn there for a reason. As if Greywethers were a portal between worlds, she finds herself transported into
- [Spotlight on Author Frances Hodgson Burnett](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-on-author-frances-hodgson-burnett/) - One of my all-time favourite children’s authors is Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of ‘The Secret Garden’ and ‘A Little Princess’. She was born on 24 November 1849, in Cheetham, near Manchester in the UK. Her father died when she was only three and after struggling along for some time, her poverty-stricken mother emigrated to
- [Celebrating ‘Bastille Day” – the story behind the famous French commemoration](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/celebrating-bastille-day/) - 'Bastille Day' commemorates the famous Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a key turning point in the French Revolution. It is a day to celebrate freedom, democracy, and liberal ideas, usually by the eating of delicious French-inspired food & the drinking of much champagne. The Bastille was a notorious fortress-prison in Paris where
- [Errombee](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/errombee/) - I have been watching & listening to the anger & anguish of the #BLM movement these past few weeks, with tears burning my eyes and a great choke of grief in my throat. As an Australian, I am particularly moved by the #AboriginalLivesMatter. I find our long and ugly history of racism, injustice and cruelty
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Chasing the Light by Jesse Blackadder](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-chasing-the-light-by-jesse-blackadder/) - It′s the early 1930s. Antarctic open-sea whaling is booming and a territorial race for the mysterious continent between Norwegian and British-Australian interests is in full swing. Aboard a ship setting sail from Cape Town carrying the Norwegian whaling magnate [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-parcel-of-patterns-by-jill-paton-walsh/) - A parcel of patterns brought the plague to Eyam. A parcel sent up from London to George Vicars, a journeyman tailor, who was lodging with Mrs. Cooper in a cottage by the west end of the churchyard. So begins Mall Percival's account of how her village of Eyam [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Captive of Sin by Anna Campbell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-captive-of-sin-by-anna-campbell/) - Returning home to Cornwall after an unspeakable tragedy, Sir Gideon Trevithick comes upon a defiant beauty in danger and vows to protect her whatever the cost. He's dismayed to discover that she's none other than Lady Charis Weston, England's wealthiest heiress [...]
- [The Familiars by Stacey Halls](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/the-familiars-by-stacey-halls/) - Young Fleetwood Shuttleworth, a noblewoman, is with child again. None of her previous pregnancies have borne fruit, and her husband, Richard, is anxious for an heir. Then Fleetwood discovers a hidden doctor’s [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Silvered Heart by Katherine Clements](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-silvered-heart-by-katherine-clements/) - 1648: Civil war is devastating England. The privileged world Katherine Ferrars knows is crumbling under Cromwell's army, and as an orphaned heiress, she has no choice but to do her duty and marry for the sake of family. But as her marriage turns into a prison, and her fortune is decimated by the war, Kate [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Mermaid Singing by Charmian Clift](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-mermaid-singing-by-charmian-clift/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): The story of a year spent by two Australian writers on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the 1950s. My Thoughts: This book was given to me by my aunt when I was in my 20s, as I had always wanted to go to Greece. I have read it a few
- [The Story Behind the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-story-behind-the-grimm-brothers-fairy-tales/) - Once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in a small kingdom in the middle of a crazy patchwork of other small kingdoms, each with its own prince or archduke to rule it. Some of these kingdoms were so small the princes could fire at each other from their castle walls. The two
- [Wilhelm Grimm: the quintessential romantic hero?](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/wilhelm-grimm-the-quintessential-romantic-hero/) - One of the problems of writing historical fiction which draws on the lives of real people is that, well, they’re real people. And if you are trying your best to be true to their life, you can’t go mucking round with known facts. Well, at least, I can’t. It’s important for me to be as
- [Writing Lessons I learned from Charles Dickens](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/writing-lessons-i-learned-from-charles-dickens/) - Writing Lessons I Learned From Charles Dickens Research deeply, and read only ‘books (that have) the air of the time in them.’ Plan slowly & carefully Write swiftly Don’t be afraid of the omniscient narrator Plot is character in action A character does not need to be likable to be empathetic You do not need
- [BOOK REVIEW: You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World by Clare Wright](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-you-daughters-of-freedom-the-australians-who-won-the-vote-and-inspired-the-world-by-clare-wright/) - For the ten years from 1902, when Australia’s suffrage campaigners won the vote for white women, the world looked to this trailblazing young democracy for inspiration. Clare Wright’s epic new history tells the story of that victory [...]
- [VINTAGE WRITING POST: Q & A for Kate Forsyth on Vasalisa The Wise](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-writing-post-q-a-for-kate-forsyth-on-vasalisa-the-wise/) - Here is the Q & A article on Vasalisa The Wise published in Good Reading Magazine Dec/Jan 17-18 1)The original Russian tale of Vasilisa seems rather bizarre. What compelled you to re-tell it? It’s the best-known Russian fairy-tale, akin to ‘Cinderella’ in Western culture, and tells the story of a brave and clever girl
- [VINTAGE WRITING POST: Mary De Morgan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-writing-post-mary-de-morgan/) - Mary de Morgan Blog ‘Help me, sweet Love!’ she cried, and then began to weep. ‘Poor Queen Blanchelys!’ said Love. ‘Your rose-tree is dead then.’ ‘My tree is dead,’ sobbed Queen Blanchelys, ‘and the King loves me no more. Ah, tell me who has killed my tree?’ ‘Your cousin Zaire has killed it,’ said
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Silent Invasion by James Bradley](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-silent-invasion-by-james-bradley/) - It's a decade from now and the human race is dying. Plants, animals and humans have been infected by spores from space and become part of a vast alien intelligence. When 16-year-old Callie discovers her little sister Gracie has been infected, she flees with Gracie to the Zone to avoid termination[...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: Angel Mage by Garth Nix](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-angel-mage-by-garth-nix/) - More than a century has passed since Liliath crept into the empty sarcophagus of Saint Marguerite, fleeing the Fall of Ystara. But she emerges from her magical sleep still beautiful, looking no more than nineteen, and once again renews her single-minded quest to be united with her lover, Palleniel, the archangel of Ystara.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-shepherds-life-by-james-rebanks/) - Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Peacock Summer by Hannah Richell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-peacock-summer-by-hannah-richell/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): Set in a fading family estate nestled within the Chiltern Hills, this is the story of two summers, sixty years apart, woven together to reveal one dramatic family story. My Thoughts: I’ve been waiting for a new novel from Hannah Richell for a long time, having absolutely adored her two earlier
- [BOOK REVIEW: Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-resurrection-bay-by-emma-viskic/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): Caleb Zelic, profoundly deaf since early childhood, has always lived on the outside - watching, picking up telltale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Desert Nurse by Pamela Hart](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-desert-nurse-by-pamela-hart/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): Amid the Australian Army hospitals of World War I Egypt, two deeply determined individuals find the resilience of their love tested to its limits It's 1911, and 21-year-old Evelyn Northey desperately wants to become a doctor. Her father forbids it, withholding the inheritance that would allow her to attend university. At
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-orchid-thief-a-true-story-of-beauty-and-obsession-by-susan-orlean/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles
- [BOOK REVIEW: Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-will-in-the-world-how-shakespeare-became-shakespeare-by-stephen-greenblatt/) - A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village by Joanna Nell](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-single-ladies-of-jacaranda-retirement-village-by-joanna-nell/) - A moving, funny, heartwarming tale of love and friendship, for anyone who loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Keeper of Lost Things and Three Things about Elsie. It's never too late to grow old disgracefully ...The life of 79-year-old pensioner Peggy Smart is as beige as the décor in her retirement village.
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-a-corner-of-white-by-jaclyn-moriarty/) - This is a tale of missing persons. Madeleine and her mother have run away from their former life, under mysterious circumstances, and settled in a rainy corner of Cambridge (in our world). Elliot, on the other hand, is in search of his father, who disappeared on the night his uncle was found dead. The talk in the town of Bonfire (in the Kingdom of Cello) is that Elliot's dad may have killed his brother [...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Citadel by Kate Mosse](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-citadel-by-kate-mosse/) - 1942, Nazi-occupied France. Sandrine, a spirited and courageous nineteen-year-old, finds herself drawn into a Resistance group in Carcassonne - codenamed 'Citadel' - made up of ordinary women who are prepared to risk everything for what is right. And when she meets Raoul, they discover a shared passion for the cause, for their homeland, and for each other. But[...]
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Lady's Slipper by Deborah Swift](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ladys-slipper-by-deborah-swift/) - 1660. King Charles II has returned from exile, but memories of the English Civil War still rankle. There are old scores to settle, and religious differences threaten to overturn a fragile peace. When Alice Ibbetson discovers a rare orchid, the Lady’s Slipper, growing in a wood belonging to Richard Wheeler, she is captivated by its beauty [...]
- [BOOK REVIEW: The Hollow Bones by Leah Kaminsky](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-hollow-bones-by-leah-kaminsky/) - The Blurb (from Goodreads): Berlin, 1938. The eve of war. Ernst Schäfer, a young, ambitious zoologist, keen hunter and devoted husband of the beautiful Herta, has come to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who invites him to lead a group of SS scientists to the frozen mountains of Tibet. Their secret mission: to search for
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Beyond The Orchard by Anna Romer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-2/) - Lucy Briar has arrived home in turmoil after years overseas. She’s met her fiancé in London and has her life mapped out, but something is holding her back. Hoping to ground herself and find answers [...]
- [LIZZIE SIDDAL: Her Life & legacy](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/lizzie-siddal-her-life-legacy/) - The National Gallery of Australia has just announced a major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art will open in mid-December, and so - being the world's most passionate lover of Pre-Raphaelite art - I thought I would share with you some of the incredible stories I discovered while researching my novel, Beauty in Thorns, which tells the story
- [THE BLUE ROSE: Reaching the Halfway Point](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-blue-rose-reaching-the-halfway-point/) - For almost a year I have been working on a novel called The Blue Rose. It tells the story of Viviane de Ravoisier, the daughter of a French marquis, and David Stronach, a Welsh gardener who travels to her chateau in Brittany to design and plant an English-style garden. The two fall in love, but
- [WRITING: To Plot or Not?](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/writing-to-plot-or-not/) - To plot, or not to plot – that is the question ... One question that I get asked a lot: Are you a plotter or a panster (meaning 'do you "fly-by-the-seat-of your pants")? I really hate this question because it implies a binary opposition between the two. The truth is, all writers have different creative
- [THE BLUE ROSE: My Novel-in-Progress](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/the-blue-rose-my-novel-in-progress-2/) - For two years I have been working on a novel called The Blue Rose. It tells the story of Viviane de Ravoisier, the daughter of a French marquis, and David Stronach, a Welsh gardener who travels to her chateau in Brittany to design and plant an English-style garden. The two fall in love, but their
- [INTERVIEW: Stephanie Parkyn](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/interview-stephanie-parkyn/) - Today I interview Stephanie Parkyn, author of the book I have just reviewed Into the World: Are you a daydreamer too? I didn’t think so, but when out walking with my characters and their dramas in my head I have stepped straight out into traffic and had cars stop for me. I’ve done this twice, so
- [VINTAGE POST: Women of the German Resistance](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-post-women-of-the-german-resistance/) - Most people – when they think of German women’s attitudes towards Adolf Hitler – imagine star-struck blonde Frauleins with their hands stretched high in the Nazi salute. Some German women were even said to eat the gravel upon which Hitler trod. There were some German women who feared and hated the Nazi leader, however, and
- [VINTAGE WRITING POST: Bitter Greens -the facts behind the fiction of the Sun King's Court](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-post-bitter-greens/) - The Facts behind the Fiction of the Sun King's Court In recent months, I’ve been visiting a lot of Book Clubs who have read my novel ‘Bitter Greens’. Some have cooked me French onion soup; others have poured me fine French champagne. All of them have been full of questions. Most questions begin ‘Is it
- [VINTAGE POST: Best Books on Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/uncategorized/vintage-post-best-books-on-fairy-tales/) - I’ve been asked to compile my list of the best books to read if you are interested in learning about the history, meaning and purpose of fairy tales. I’ve tried to pick books of general interest, and which I personally have found illuminating. There are many, many more, of course, and no doubt I’ll kick
- [VINTAGE POST: Rainer Maria Rilke](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-post-rainer-maria-rilke/) - I first encountered Rainer Maria Rilke when a friend gave me a copy of LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET when I was in my early twenties. It spoke to me very powerfully, and some lines were deeply engraved into my soul: “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would
- [VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: Butterfly On A Pin by Alannah Hill](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-butterfly-on-a-pin-by-alannah-hill/) - Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was one of hardship, fear and abuse. At an early age she ran away from home with eight suitcases of costumes and a fierce determination to succeed,
- [BOOK REVIEW: Verity Sparks, Lost and Found by Susan Green](https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-verity-sparks-lost-and-found-by-susan-green/) - The Blurb (From Goodreads): Melbourne. 1879. Verity Sparks has found her father. But she has lost her gift - the ability to find lost things. Papa Savinov, eager for Verity to become a proper lady, sends her to the exclusive boarding school Hilltop House. But Verity is more interested in solving the case of the

## Pages

- [Kate Forsyth](https://kateforsyth.com.au/) - One of the finest writers of this generation
- [Tours & Retreats](https://kateforsyth.com.au/tours-and-retreats/)
- [Writing retreats](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-retreats/)
- [Online Workshops](https://kateforsyth.com.au/event/upcoming-talks-workshop/)
- [From Ancient Myths to Modern Storytellers Retreat](https://kateforsyth.com.au/from-ancient-myths-to-modern-storytellers-retreat/) - Join award-winning author and poet Kate Forsyth on a 10-day literary odyssey through the ancient and fabled land of Greece. My fascination with Greece began with its myths. They sowed in me a longing to travel to Greece, and a love for its ancient stories. One thing that struck me, however, was that all the Greek heroes
- [Cotswolds Writing Retreat](https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-retreat-in-the-cotswolds/) - A WRITING RETREAT & LITERARY TOUR IN THE COTSWOLDS WITH KATE FORSYTH & BETTER READ LITERARY TOURS A literary experience you’ll never forget! Here is the date for the next Writing Retreats in the Cotswolds with Kate Forsyth: Click here to find out more! Sunday 23 April to Monday 1 May 2023 **BOOKED OUT** Sunday
- [Talking Teaching Storytelling](https://kateforsyth.com.au/talking-teaching-storytelling/) - Kate Forsyth Novelist - Speaker - Master Storyteller Award-winning & bestselling author Kate Forsyth has captivated audiences all around the world with her passion, charm and verve. One moment she’ll make you laugh; the next she’ll bring you to the brink of tears. Most of all, she will inspire you to find your own story
- [Children's Books](https://kateforsyth.com.au/childrens-books/) - Children’s and Young Adult BooksLatest Children’s Books The Impossible Quest Buy Now Buy Now Coming February2015 Four unlikely heroesFour mysterious giftsFour impossible tasksFive thrilling books The Impossible Quest is set in the far away land of Wolfhaven. It tells the story of four friends who are forces into undertaking an impossible quest to try and
- [Bitter Greens](https://kateforsyth.com.au/bitter-greens/) - BITTER GREENS has won the American Library Association (ALA) Award for Best Historical Novel. It was also chosen as one of the Best Historical Novels of 2014 by the Library Journal in the US, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar Award, and the Norma K. Hemming Award (for which it received an
- [The Beast's Garden](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-beasts-garden/) - THE BEAST’S GARDEN is a retelling of the Grimm’s Beauty and The Beast set in Nazi Germany. Ava is a young woman who marries a Nazi officer in order to save her father, but she hates and fears her new husband and the regime for which he works. She becomes involved with an underground resistance
- [Stories](https://kateforsyth.com.au/stories/)
- [Creative Non-Fiction](https://kateforsyth.com.au/creative-non-fiction/)
- [The 50-50 Project](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-50-50-project/) - The 50-50 Project My birthday in June took me a stride closer to a significant birthday and so I thought I would compile a list of things I want to do and places I want to go … maybe one day. Travel & Adventure 1. See Uluru at sunset 2. Walk the Great Wall of
- [Best Books On Writing & Creativity](https://kateforsyth.com.au/best-books-on-writing-creativity/) - Best Books On Writing & Creativity Christopher Booker – The Seven Basic Plots Terry Brooks – Sometimes The Magic Works: Lessons From A Writing Life Gail Carson Levine – Writing Magic - Creating Stories That Fly Roy Peter Clark – Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer Louise Doughty – A Novel In A Year Alice. W Flaherty - The
- [BEAUTY IN THORNS](https://kateforsyth.com.au/beauty-in-thorns/) - The extraordinary love story behind Edward Burne-Jones’s famous ‘Sleeping Beauty’ paintings Kindle Amazon
- [The Cunning Women's Daughter](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-cunning-womens-daughter/) - The Cunning Woman’s Daughter Cerne Abbas July 1540 I was conceived under the Giant, in the old way, with a man my mother never knew. She wanted a child of her own, she said, after having brought so many other babies into the world. She was a midwife, my mother, and a hedge-witch. People came to
- [Morgan Of The Fay](https://kateforsyth.com.au/morgan-of-the-fay/) - Morgan of the Fay There are those who believe that we of the fay are immortal. They are wrong. We are born, we grow, we die, just like any other living creature. It is true that time moves to a different rhythm in the realm of Annwn but that does not mean we do not
- [Dreams of the Dead](https://kateforsyth.com.au/dreams-of-the-dead/) - Dreams of the Dead St Pancras, London – November 1856 The first ghost that Mary de Morgan ever saw was her dead sister, Alice. She was a cold breath on the back of Mary’s neck, a shiver like a goosey walking over a grave. Sometimes Mary felt sure she had seen her, a flash of
- [The Boy from the Monster Forest](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-boy-from-the-monster-forest/) - The Boy from the Monster Forest Cailean wandered along the alley, rattling his stick against the old barrels piled against the walls, the absence of his dog bothering him like an aching tooth. Suddenly he glanced up, sensing danger, as four boys rose from their hiding-places, grinning nastily. “Och, if it no’ Cailean the Simple!
- [Bookings & Fees](https://kateforsyth.com.au/about/bookings-fees/)
- [Endorsements](https://kateforsyth.com.au/endorsements/) - Monique Mulligan Forsyth held the audience spellbound as she shared where her love of fairy tales originated. Her oral storytelling abilities are amazing – audience members were mesmerised, some brushing away tears ... Therese Noble I was privileged to be able to attend Kate's History, Mystery and Magic course in the Cotswolds in 2014. My
- [Contact](https://kateforsyth.com.au/contact-me/) - Contact Me First Name Last Name Email Address Comments/Enquiries Thanks so much for wanting to get in contact with me. I love hearing from my readers. Please forgive me if it takes me a while to get back to you – I do get hundreds of emails! If you wish me to come and talk
- [Biography](https://kateforsyth.com.au/about/official-biography/)
- [The Wild Girl](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-wild-girl/) - THE WILD GIRL was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013 by Australian readers, and earned a starred review by the American Library Association Booklist, who called it "a beautiful and often heartbreaking love story that is sure to move and captivate readers.' THE WILD GIRL tells one of the greatest untold love stories of all time –
- [About](https://kateforsyth.com.au/about/) - I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I was writing stories and poems from the time I could first hold a pencil and I wrote my first novel when I was only seven. I think it’s because I have always loved books so much. It doesn’t matter what
- [Favourite Writers - Children](https://kateforsyth.com.au/favourite-writers-children/) - Favourite Writers - Children Classic Children’s Writers Joan Aiken – The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Midnight Is A Place, Go Saddle the Sea Louisa M. Alcott – Little Women; Eight Cousins Lloyd Alexander – The Book of Three; The Black Cauldron; The Castle of Llyr; Taran Wanderer; The High King Lucy M. Boston – The
- [Favourite Writers - Adult](https://kateforsyth.com.au/favourite-writers-adult/) - FAVOURITE ADULT WRITERS Classics Jane Austen – Persuasion; Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Emma Anne Brontë – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights Charles Dickens – The Tale of Two Cities; Oliver Twist; A Christmas Carol; Great Expectations S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces Daphne du Maurier –
- [The Blue Rose Excerpt](https://kateforsyth.com.au/the-blue-rose-excerpt/) - Chapter 7 – A Rose as Red as Blood 12–20 November 1788 In November, the starlings flew from the cold north. Viviane leant her chin in her hands and gazed out at the twilight sky. This year there seemed to be more than ever before. Swirling and eddying and spiralling against the rose-coloured clouds,
- [Favourite Writers - Non-Fiction](https://kateforsyth.com.au/favourite-writers-non-fiction/) - Favourite Writers - Non-Fiction John Bailey - The Lost German Slave Girl Mary Dobson - Disease: The Extraordinary Stories Behind History's Deadliest Killers Amanda Foreman - The Duchess Don and Petie Kladstrup - Champagne: How's the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hardship Don & Petie Kladstrup - Wine & War - The French, the Nazis, and France's Greatest Treasure

## Books & Stories

- [The Changeling](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-changeling/) - Set against Scotland’s first witch-hunt, a young woman with faery blood must defy two queens to survive love, magic and treachery.
- [Psykhe](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/psykhe/) - It is not wise to anger the gods ... or to fall in love with one. Kate Forsyth gives voice, power and agency to Psykhe telling this much loved myth from the perspective of the woman at its centre.
- [The Crimson Thread](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-crimson-thread/) - In Nazi - occupied Crete, a young woman risks her life to hide two Allied soldiers from the Germans…
- [The Beast's Garden](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/type-the-book-name-here/) - THE BEAST’S GARDEN is a retelling of the Grimm’s Beauty and The Beast set in Nazi Germany. Ava is a young woman who marries a Nazi officer in order to save her father, but she hates and fears her new husband and the regime for which he works. She becomes involved with an underground resistance
- [THE WILD GIRL](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-wild-girl/) - THE WILD GIRL was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013 by Australian readers, and earned a starred review by the American Library Association Booklist, who called it "a beautiful and often heartbreaking love story that is sure to move and captivate readers.' THE WILD GIRL tells one of the greatest untold love stories of all time –
- [The Chain Of Charms](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-chain-of-charms/) - The Gypsy Crown Cover art by Jeremy Reston Maggie has given them the first charm - an old gold coin - but Luka and Emilia must escape the brutal thief-taker, Coldham. With a horse, a monkey, a dog, and a huge brown bear in their train, it is hard to travel secretly as they flee
- [Dancing on Knives](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/dancing-on-knives/) - A damaged family and their generations of dangerous secrets At twenty, Sara is tormented by an inexplicable terror so profound she hasn't left her home in five years. Like the mermaid in the fairytale her Spanish grandmother once told her, Sara imagines she is Dancing on Knives, unable to speak. She feels suffocated by her
- [Bitter Greens](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/book-3/) - BITTER GREENS has won the American Library Association (ALA) Award for Best Historical Novel. It was also chosen as one of the Best Historical Novels of 2014 by the Library Journal in the US, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar Award, and the Norma K. Hemming Award (for which it received an
- [The Starthorn Tree](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-chronicles-of-estelliana/) - Pedrin is a hearthkin boy, forced to labour for the hated starkin Lisandre is a starkin princess, living in luxury in the Castle of Estelliana Briony is a foundling child brought up by a wildkin witch Durrik can tell the future ... The young Count of Estelliana lies in an enchanted sleep and no-one can
- [The Puzzle Ring](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-puzzle-ring/) - 'The Puzzle Ring' is an historical fantasy for children aged 10+. It tells the story of a girl who discovers that her family was cursed long ago, and the only way to break the curse is to find and fix a broken puzzle ring. To do this, she must travel back in time to the
- [Alchemy](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/alchemy/) - ‘Alchemy’ is a bold and beautiful collaboration between two very different artists. Kate Forsyth is an award-winning novelist, poet, and storyteller. Wendy Sharpe is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded artists. Together they pour their words and images into an imaginative crucible to create a powerful narrative of a woman’s life. Birth to Death.
- [The Witches of Eileanan](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-witches-of-eileanan/) - Dragonclaw, The Pool of Two Moons, The Cursed Towers, The Forbidden Land, The Skull of the World, Fathomless Caves
- [Searching For Charlotte](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/searching-for-charlotte/) - The Fascinating Story of Australia’s First Children’s Author Told by her great-great-great-great-granddaughtersKate Forsyth & Belinda Murrell Writing is in their blood 180 years ago, Australia’s first children’s book was published by an anonymous writer known only as ‘a lady long resident in New South Wales’. The identity of the author was one of Australia’s most
- [The Blue Rose](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-blue-rose/) - The Blue Rose tells the story of an impossible love between a marquis’s daughter and a gardener, and was inspired by a true quest for a blood-red rose that blooms even in winter. It moves from France during the 'Terror' of the French Revolution to Imperial China, a mysterious and scarcely discovered land of mandarins with
- [Grumpy Grandpa](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/grumpy-grandpa/) - Synopsis: When Grandpa wakes, he's cross and cranky. He honks like an elephant into his hanky ... A delightful story about visiting Grandpa and discovering that people are not quite what they seem. Background to the Story: I wrote ‘Grumpy Grandpa’ for my daughter Ella and her not-so-grumpy grandpas one afternoon while I was waiting
- [I Am](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/i-am/) - "I am Tim. I am four and three quarters. Next year I will go to school. This year I'm exploring the world." A lyrical story about the day in the life of an imaginative four-year-old boy. Written using first-person pronouns, as difficulty with pronouns is a common glitch in children's speech, a guide on how
- [Two Selkie Stories from Scottland](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/two-selkie-stories-from-scottland/) - Two Selkie Stories from Scotland, retold by Kate Forsyth and illustrated by Fiona McDonald. In this book, two beautiful traditional Scottish fairy tales, ‘The Selkie Bride’ and ‘In the Kingdom of the Seals’, are brought to enchanting and haunting new life by two creators who are themselves eerily linked to the magical world of the
- [Dragon Gold](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-magical-misadventures/) - Dragon Gold Cover art by Mitch Vane Synopsis With these magic words, I begin my spell.Hear me, first star, hear me well.Send me dragon's gold, from the days of old.The spell has been cast, let the magic last. Ben wants to get a dog. Badly. But his mum says they'll have to move to a
- [The Rebirth of Rapunzel](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-rebirth-of-rapunzel/) - A unique collection presenting Kate Forsyth's extensive academic research into the 'Rapunzel' fairy tale, alongside several other pieces related to fairy tales and folklore. This book is not your usual reference work, but a complex and engaging exploration of the subject matter, written with Forsyth’s distinctive flair. Cover artwork by Kathleen Jennings “The Rebirth of Rapunzel:
- [Once](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/once/) - OnceA long time agoMy grandmother’s grandmotherTravelled far, far across the seasOver the rim of the world to where the stars were new Kate Forsyth tells tales of her ancestors’ lives in Australia in this beautifully illustrated picture book that celebrates the power of story. From the first perilous journey to a new land, to the
- [Long-Lost Fairy-Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/long-lost-fairy-tales/) - Fairy tales are as old as language itself. In the beginning, such tales of wonder were told by a storyteller to an audience, in the darkness of a long winter to while away the hours, in a marketplace to amuse and beguile the passerbys, to young men and women about to set forth on their
- [The Cursed Towers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-cursed-towers/) - Ye who have betrayed us so, I lay this curse upon ye!.. May ye be forever piteous but have none pity ye, may ye long for death but have death elude ye! By the power o' the dark moons, I curse thee, I curse thee, I curse thee! Synopsis Lachlan the Winged now holds the
- [The Silver Well](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-silver-well/) - The Silver Well received a starred review in Publishers' Weekly & won the 2017 Aurealis Award for Best Collection. One of Kate’s stories, ‘The Cunning Woman's Daughter’ also won the 2017 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novella. Best-selling legends of Australian fantasy Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins have teamed up in this collection of 7
- [The Impossible Quest](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-impossible-quest/) - Four unlikely heroes Four mysterious gifts Four impossible tasks Five thrilling books ‘Tell your lord to beware,’ the wild man said, gripping Tom’s arm with a dirty hand. ‘The wolves smell danger in the wind.’ The Impossible Quest is set in the faraway land of Wolfhaven. It tells the story of four friends who
- [Fathomless Caves](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/fathomless-caves/) - 'I saw the scaly sea rise and flood the land, the Red Wanderer like a bloody gash in the sky. That is when they will come, with the rising o' the red comet the Fairgean shall come ...' Before his death, the blind prophet Jorge had foreseen the conjuring of a tidal wave by the
- [The Skull of the World](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-skull-of-the-world/) - 'Sign of the Soul-Sage, a good omen for your quest,' the Soul-Sage said. 'A sign of death as well as wisdom, though, remember. Change ahead for you, like the change wrought on a landscape by an avalanche. There are things in your past and in your unknown which shall seize you in their jaws and
- [The Forbidden Land](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-forbidden-land/) - We have come because His Highness Lachlan MacCuinn has requested the help o' your daughter Fionnghal,' Enit replied quietly. 'She has particular skills that the Rìgh is in dire need o'.' 'Aye, thieving and deceiving and sneaking about like that wicked cat o' hers,' her mother said with bitter shame in her voice. 'Very well,
- [The Pool of Two Moons](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-pool-of-two-moons/) - Rumours in the countryside tell o' a prophecy - they say a winged man will come to save the land, bearing the lost lodestar in his hand. He shall come with the dragons at his shoulder and all the powers o' sorcery at his command... A gripping story of magic and adventure, The Pool of
- [Dragonclaw](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/dragonclaw/) - Meghan looked directly into the dragon's topaz eyes for the first time... She had a sensation of time rolling away, vast vistas of years, the swing of planets and stars. Sunsets bloomed above her head, clouds raced away, the world spun on its axis and the dragon's eyes glittered cold... A tale of dark mysteries,
- [Tower Of Ravens](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/tower-of-ravens/) - One-Horn's daughter is not like the other satyricorns. Born of a human father, she has failed to grow the horns so prized by her kind. Soon the satyricorns will kill her – and even if she runs away, their swift hunters will find her in the end. When she sees a herd of magnificent winged
- [The Heart of Stars](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-heart-of-stars/) - Lord Malvern swore he would have revenge on Lachlan the Winged for the death of his brother and nephew. Now Lachlan is dead, and his children have all been stolen away. When their life-blood has been spilt to raise the beloved dead from their graves, Lord Malvern's revenge will be sweet indeed. Lachlan's son Donncan
- [The Shining City](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-shining-city/) - Synopsis Imprisoned in Sorrowgate Tower, Rhiannon awaits trial for murder and treason, while her winged horse, Blackthorn, flies forlornly over Lucescere, the Shining City, her bond of loyalty to Rhiannon keeping her near. Rhiannon is haunted by the malevolent ghost of a dead queen, hungry to live again - and she is not the only
- [BEAUTY IN THORNS](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/beauty-in-thorns/) - BEAUTY-IN-THORNS The extraordinary love story behind Edward Burne-Jones’s famous ‘Sleeping Beauty’ paintings In 1890, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones finished a monumental series of paintings inspired by ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Greeted with ecstasy by the public, it sold for a record 15,000 guineas and made the artist a rich and famous man. Told by the voices of
- [The Butterfly in Amber](https://kateforsyth.com.au/book/the-butterfly-in-amber/) - Cover art by Jeremy Reston Luka and Emilia travel to London to find the last of the Graylings tribe, who has married a Puritan lawyer and turned her back on her past. As well as all the perils of the capital city, the children must escape the vengeful Coldham, and still get to Kingston in

## Articles

- [Five have what it takes: J.K. Rowling & Enid Blyton](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/five-have-what-it-takes-j-k-rowling-enid-blyton/) - There could be few people left on the face of this planet who have not heard of Harry Potter. You know, the one that has had kids camping outside bookshops all night. The one that has made sardine-flavoured jelly beans fashionable. Maybe, if you’d been in a contemplation retreat for the past four years, you
- [The Forgotten Fairy Tale Tellers](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-forgotten-fairy-tale-tellers/) - Mention fairy tale tellers, and the first name to come to mind is the Grimm brothers. Next is likely to be Hans Christian Anderson, and then Charles Perrault. You may well add Oscar Wilde to the list, or even George MacDonald. Rack your brains and you might come up with Andrew Lang and the Blue
- [And Another Thing: Kate Forsyth Talks About Her Struggle with Stuttering](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/and-another-thing-kate-forsyth-talks-about-her-struggle-with-stuttering/) - I have struggled with my stutter all my life. When I was young, my stutter was so profound that at times I found it impossible to speak. Although I could hear the words in my mind, my tongue, my mouth, my throat were utterly paralysed, convulsing with my desperate efforts to make them work in
- [Slaying Dragons – Why Fantasy Fiction is Vital Reading for Children](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/slaying-dragons-why-fantasy-fiction-is-vital-reading-for-children/) - J.K. Rowling and the boy wizard with the lightning scar. Christopher Paolini, and the poor farm boy who tames a dragon. Stephanie Meyer, and her sparkling vampires. Their books have sold more than 500 million copies in the last dozen years. Add the sales of J.R.R Tolkien (150 million for The Lord of the Rings
- [Cinderella Fights back](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/cinderella-fights-back/) - Mia has said the heroines of fairy tales make her want to claw her own face off. She worries about the effect on her own daughter of an obsession with pink, plastic princesses churned out in their millions by Disney Inc. Don’t blame fairy tales, blame the men who took the tales and retold them. Charles Perrault, Jacob and
- [The Birth of Fantasy: Tolkien and his Lecture on Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-birth-of-fantasy-tolkien-and-his-lecture-on-fairy-tales/) - Kate Forsyth examines Tolkien’s famous lecture on Fairy Tales and how it helped him to invent the genre of fantasy as we know it today The genre of fiction that we know as ‘fantasy’ was born on 8 March 1939, on a cold, sleeting spring evening at the University of St Andrews on the east
- [The Birth of Science Fiction: Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-birth-of-science-fiction-mary-shelley-and-the-writing-of-frankenstein/) - Kate Forsyth shares the fascinating story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein, often called the first science fiction Most lovers of science fiction would agree that it is a literary genre dominated by men. At least until the 1970s, most science- fiction books were written by men, published by men, and read by
- [Fuddling Up My Mucking Words Again](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/fuddling-up-my-mucking-words-again/) - Last week, teaching at a Winter Writers’ Retreat at Trinity College at Melbourne University, I asked my students how we could show the characteristic of shyness in a character in a story. ‘She could stutter,’ one suggested. ‘St-st-st-stuttering is a neurological dysfunction,’ I answered. ‘A failure of the synapses of the brain to properly connect
- [Stories as Salvation](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/stories-as-salvation/) - I was only a child when I faced death for the first time. Aged just two years and four months old, I was savaged by my father’s Doberman Pinscher in the back garden of our home in the Artarmon veterinary hospital. Tossed like a rag doll, my ear was torn from my head and the
- [Historical Fiction Deserves a Future](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/historical-fiction-deserves-a-future/) - Historical fiction is booming. The much-publicised success of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is just the tip of the iceberg for a genre that rivals any other in contemporary publishing. As an author of some 30 books – of which only one is set in contemporary times – this pleases me, but
- [Books Are Dangerous](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/books-are-dangerous/) - Books are dangerous. I have known this ever since I set my bed on fire when I was about four years old. My sister and I had been tucked up in bed, but I wanted to keep on reading. I waited until my mother had gone, and then I created a tent under my bedspread
- [The Big Idea: Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-big-idea-fairy-tales/) - Fairy tales have been with us for a very long time. Ever since humans invented language, we have used those sounds laden with meaning to create stories – to teach, to warn, to entertain, and to effect change upon the world. Those stories have been handed down through many generations – changing with each retelling,
- [Daydreaming & Creativity](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/daydreaming-creativity/) - I have always been a great builder of castles in the air. My Year 5 teacher would, without any warning, rap my head with a ruler, saying, ‘are you with us, Katie?’ I’d jump like a startled rabbit, jerked back into the ordinary world. The dazed expression on my face made everyone around me giggle.
- [The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-secret-history-of-the-grimm-fairy-tales/) - I was enchanted with the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales from the moment I read them as a little girl, sick and lonely in hospital. I was only seven, but I still remember the transformative experience of reading the tales by myself for the first time. I had been given a copy of the edition translated
- [The Visual Language of Fairy-tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/the-visual-language-of-fairy-tales/) - Fairy-tales are as old as language itself. Indeed, many linguistic scholars believe that language was invented simply so that humans could tell each other stories. Non-verbal communication is surprisingly effective, as anyone who has observed chimpanzees at the zoo can confirm. However, for humans to express more sophisticated ideas they needed a more subtle and
- [Suffragette Mary De Morgan: England’s First Feminist Fairy Tale Writer](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/suffragette-mary-de-morgan-englands-first-feminist-fairy-tale-writer/) - Ask anyone for the names of the great fairy tale tellers, and most people will answer Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. A few may summon up the names Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde or George Macdonald. But hardly anyone will mention Mary de Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite, suffragette, and one of England’s first feminist fairy
- [Drawing Inspiration from Fairy Tales](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/drawing-inspiration-from-fairy-tales/) - I am famously fascinated by fairy tales – I love their wild beauty and their hidden claws. Many of my novels draw inspiration from myth and folklore and fairy-tale. However, my books are not conventional retellings, in the way that Ella Enchanted is a retelling of ‘Cinderella’. I am more interested in the history of
- [Four Fascinating Women of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/four-fascinating-women-of-the-pre-raphaelite-sisterhood/) - My new novel ‘Beauty in Thorns’ is a novel about love, art and awakenings of all kinds. It is inspired by the true-life story of the Pre-Raphaelites, a circle of poets and artists in the mid-19th century who sought to unshackle themselves from the constraints of Victorian art & society. My novel is told in
- [Grimm Fairytale Good Weekend](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/grimm-fairytale-good-weekend/) - I have always loved fairy tales. Given a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales as a little girl, I was enchanted by its stories: the girl with impossibly long hair locked away in a tower, the princes turned into swans, the sleeping castle hidden behind thorns. Growing up, I thought that the Grimm brothers were elderly men dressed
- [Made for Art: Novels which Recreate the Lives of Famous Artists](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/4796/) - Ever since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by novels which imagine the lives of real-life artists. My interest was sparked by The Agony and The Ecstasy, which I read when I was fourteen. It retells the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti by the American writer Irving Stone. Published in 1961, it opens with
- [Re-enchanting the World](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/re-enchanting-the-world/) - I have lived all my life in a city, but in my heart, I yearn for the wild. I want to see the incandescent lights of the aurora borealis dance through the darkness, I want to hear wolves howl, and be surprised by the sudden rush of muffled wings as a snowy owl swoops past.
- [Art & Agoraphobia](https://kateforsyth.com.au/articles/art-agoraphobia/) - Art & Agoraphobia Sunday Life July 6, 2007 It may have been Emily Dickinson who struck the first spark. Certainly her story fascinated me. The eccentric spinster who never left her home and never allowed visitors to see her. Dressed always in white, in the fashions of her youth, she sat in the darkness on

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