Kathryn's Inbox

Australian author Anna Romer is in fine form with her latest release Under the Midnight Sky. A romantic tale with a mystery at its core and some fine gothic elements, it tells the story of Abby, a journalist, who is haunted by the abduction and murder of her childhood friend many years before. Returning to the small town where she grew up, she finds an injured young woman on the side of the road, but when she summons help, the girl disappears. Was it in her imagination, or is it possible that there is something darker afoot? Abby barely has time to digest the idea when chance leads her to Ravenswood, an old country house and its new owner, Tom, a reclusive man who has carved out a career writing crime novels. When Abby discovers a hidden room in Ravenswood and a page of a diary written by a young woman who went missing with her sister many years before, she realises that there may be something much darker afoot. And what is the connection between the two sisters who vanished in the...

Beyond the Orchard is a beautiful story of love, loneliness, family and secrets, spanning the twentieth century. Lucy Briar left home in a hurry, keen to get away from a broken heart and past mistakes. Five years later, a mysterious letter from her distant grandfather, claiming that he wants to explain everything, arrives and Lucy finds herself leaving London, and her fiance for her hometown of Melbourne. Her grandfather, Edwin, passes away before she arrives. Her father, Ron, who is struggling with his own problems insists that she travels to Bitterwood, the old estate in country Victoria owned by her grandfather, to retrieve a photo album. What Lucy finds at Bitterwood leads her to uncovering another, much darker, family secret ... Of all of Anna Romer's novels, Beyond the Orchard is by far my favourite for its dark mystery and surprising conclusion. I loved reading the story of Orah and her tragic arrival in Australia that eventually brought her to Bitterwood, as well ...

Hello and welcome to my stop on the Beyond the Orchard blog tour. I am very, very excited to share this brilliant and insightful post that author Anna Romer has written about her latest novel, Beyond the Orchard. (In fact, it's been difficult for me keeping it under wraps these past few weeks.) Anyway, a very sincere thank you to Anna Romer and also her publisher Simon and Schuster Australia for putting together this brilliant post and the Beyond the Orchard Blog Tour ... Past and Present: How the Lives of One Generation Shape the Next in Anna Romer's Beyond the Orchard. When I first started collecting ideas for Beyond the Orchard , all I had was a location – a clifftop guesthouse along the great Ocean Road in Victoria – and the idea of someone guarding a terrible secret. But as the story began to unfold, I realised that the secret keeper, Edwin Briar, would cast his shadow over just about every other character in the novel. His actions would link the centr...

Australian author Anna Romer's second novel Lyrebird Hill is a fascinating tale of amnesia, family secrets and loss. On the surface, Ruby Cardel would appear to have a happy life. She runs a successful business and a loving and supportive boyfriend. Soon, her life begins to unravel--first by the discovery of lingerie in her boyfriend's pocket and then by the discover that the death of her older sister was far from accidental. Ruby returns to her childhood home, where she discovers more than she thought possible--including the diary of Brenna, a woman imprisoned for murder in the late nineteenth century. Running parallel to Ruby's own story is that of Brenna--a young woman also brought up at Lyrebird Hill and eventually trapped in an unhappy marriage.  The duel narratives of Lyrebird Hill work well, and I found Brenna and Ruby's stories to be quite interesting. With Brenna I knew, (or at least thought that I knew,) what would happen, though the questions of how...