Emily Paull

I first met Louise Allan several years ago, when we were introduced via Twitter.  I was looking for feedback on my work-- not getting quite  what I needed when I asked my family to tell me what they thought of my work in progress.  It was Annabel Smith (author of Whisky, Charlie, Foxtrot ) who suggested that I invite a couple of other local writers to meet up and talk writing, and one of those writers was Louise. From those early meetings, when we swapped manuscripts and navigated the tricky task of giving each other feedback without damaging any egos too  much, to today, when Louise's book is in print and is going incredibly well, she has become a great friend of mine: reliable, honest, compassionate and dedicated to the things that she believes in. I feel incredibly lucky to count her among my friends, and am incredibly proud of how far Louise and her book have come. Louise's novel  The Sisters' Song  was released in Australia on the 2nd of January,...

Hodder & Stoughton Publishing, 2017 (I own a copy, courtesy of the publisher) When Lane Roanoke receives a telephone call from her grandfather, telling her that her cousin Allegra has gone missing, she is forced to confront the things she learned about being a Roanoke Girl eleven years earlier when she ran away from the family home. Roanoke girls are beautiful, rich and mysterious, but they also have a habit of running away or killing themselves.  The summer that Lane turned 15, when she first came to the Roanoke properly outside Osage Flats, Kansas, she was leaving an unhappy home.  Her mother, Eleanor (also a Roanoke girl), had been plagued by melancholy Lane's entire life.  After her suicide, Lane learns that her grandparents, whom she has never met, want to take her in.  Not just will take her in, want her.  Lane discovers what a happy, loving home is for the first time in her life, and she meets her cousin Allegra who has been a Roanoke girl since...

Scribe Publishing, 2017 (I own a copy courtesy of the publisher) Scribe Publishing, 2017 I was in the mood for a big, historical novel when I chose A Vineyard in Andalusia  off my teetering TBR pile just before the new year. Clocking in at a little over 500 pages, this novel promised adventure and romance, and to top it all off, it had a recommendation from Kate Morton on the cover. Expectations were high. And for once, I was delighted in having those expectations surpassed. A Vineyard in Andalusia  is so much more than a light-hearted historical romp-- it has a bit of everything, and in following the travels of Mauro Larrea, I constantly found my thoughts shifting to reading one of my favourite classics, The Three Musketeers. The book is set around 1860 and follows Don Mauro Larrea, a mining mogul from Mexico who has just learned that the big financial risk he took, commissioning mining machinery from an American despite the threat posed by the civil war, has left him...