How or why did that come about?

Well, yeah, so I originally, my very first novel, Good Little Liars, was sent out without much knowledge of the industry initially.

And without any success in Australia, I literally gave the poor publishers three months over Christmas to decide and then thought they were all just ignoring me.

Little did I know how it doesn't work like that.

But I sent it off to, when I didn't hear back from those top five publishers that I'd heard of back then, because I knew nothing about, you know, all of the different things.

I heard about Bookature, who were a digital first imprint of Hachette UK.

They were very kind to give me a two book deal.

She's made a momentous decision about her future which doesn't only just affect her but affects in particular her granddaughter Lottie.

Sarah Clutton's going to read from The Bookshop of Buried Past.

my recent imaginings about finding long-lost family members and discovering they are not all self-obsessed attention-seeking egomaniacs like my mother.

I wonder if my DNA test will show I have Nordic heritage.

I sent the test away six weeks ago and I'm impatiently waiting at the results.

I never met David, the man who was in Miriam's life for only a few months and left her pregnant with me, but I'm dying to find out any family connections he might have.

I have him to thank for my excellent grandmother, Phyllida.

She's been a rock my whole life.

What does the letter say?

Ah.

And I tried really hard and worked on that for a long time.

So anyway, I thought, "Okay.

Well, if I can't get my picture book published, I'll try middle-grade fiction." So I wrote a story ...

Oh, no.

First of all, I wrote, um, a short little kids' short story that got published in the school magazine, and I was very excited, 'cause it was really the first time I'd sent anything out, apart from my picture book.

And that got published, so I thought, "Oh, this is obviously where I belong, in the sort of, you know, eight to 10-year-old category and whatever." And so I wrote a middle-grade book called The Hoverloon, which was about a, a, like a flying machine, and this girl who has second sight and can see the future, can see that her dad's flying machine is gonna fall on her teacher and kill her unless she does something to intervene.

Yeah.