Sydney to Colombo — writing about two worlds in one year

Sometimes when working I get dizzy. Not out of tiredness, though there's plenty of that, but from the distance I travel without leaving my chair. One day I'm walking the blacked-out streets of wartime Sydney, absorbing the anxiety of a city that suddenly finds the war not on the other side of the world but terrifyingly close to home. The next day, I'm on a hillside in Sri Lanka, back when it was called Ceylon, surrounded by a green counterpane of tea bushes stretching in every direction, the air thick with birdsong, and the year is 1910. It’s hard not to feel a touch of vertigo.

Two Historical Novels, Two Very Different Worlds

My nineteenth novel, Under a Southern Sky, came out at the end of November 2025. It's set during the Second World War in Sydney and other parts of New South Wales, Australia. Now, just months later, my publisher is about to send The Tea Planter's Secret out into the world, set in colonial Ceylon around 1910, with chapters that take readers into the cloisters of Edwardian Oxford and Cambridge. Two books, different in atmosphere and yet, as I've come to realise, connected.

Writing Wartime Australia — Under a Southern Sky

Under a Southern Sky demanded a lot of energy from me. Wartime fiction has an inherent urgency to it. There's danger in the air, a sense that nothing can be taken for granted, and the characters carry that tension in their bones. Sydney in the early 1940s was a city being transformed: by military personnel, including the influx of Americans; by the fear of attack; by the way war reshapes relationships and forces people into choices they never imagined making. Writing the book meant immersing myself in that world of women stepping into new roles and men disappearing to places their families could barely find on a map. I loved doing the research, drawing on military records, newspaper archives from the period, and the kinds of personal accounts that remind you these were real people living through extraordinary times. Indeed, my school friend's mum, June, was one of them — a young Aussie woman working as a driver for the Yanks!

Image credit: State Library of New South Wales, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bringing Colonial Ceylon to Life — The Tea Planter's Secret

The Tea Planter's Secret took me into a different world. Where the Australian novel moves at the pace of wartime — urgent, propulsive, shadowed by threat — the Ceylon story has a slower, more layered rhythm. Life there in 1910 operated around the elaborate social rituals of the colonial British community. But beneath the surface, nothing is quite as it seems. Buried secrets, native rituals, relationships shaped by the inequalities of the colonial world.

Researching Historical Fiction — From Military Archives to Vanished Worlds

Researching this era was a different challenge entirely. Edwardian Ceylon is a world that has largely vanished. Colonial records exist, and the tea plantation histories offer a certain perspective, but capturing the texture of daily life — what people wore, what they ate, how the air felt at the coast compared to the highlands, the quality of light on a veranda in the hill country, the sounds of the natural world — required me to dig deeper and sometimes to trust my imagination where the sources fell silent. The Oxford and Cambridge chapters brought yet another atmosphere into the mix: the formal rituals of academic life, the sense of a world that believed itself permanent and was about to be proved spectacularly wrong — as I am now exploring in my next book.

Image credit:Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Creative Challenge of Switching Between Books

A question I'm often asked is how I manage the transition between projects, and I'll be honest, it isn't always graceful. There is a kind of creative whiplash involved in moving from one world to another, particularly when the worlds are as far apart as wartime New South Wales and Edwardian Ceylon. The danger is that the voice of one book bleeds into the other, that the mood you've so carefully built dissolves because your head is still half in a different century. I've learned that the transition requires a kind of resettling. I go back to my research materials; I re-read earlier chapters; I look at photographs from the period until I can feel myself there again. It's a bit like adjusting to a different climate. I need to give myself time to acclimatise before I can move freely.

What Connects These Two Stories

What's surprised me, though, is how much these two different novels have in common beneath the surface. Both are set in countries profoundly shaped by the British Empire, though at different stages of that complicated history. Both are stories about people whose private lives — their loves, their loyalties, their secrets — are caught up in forces larger than themselves. And both, ultimately, are about what happens when the world you thought you knew turns out to be built on foundations less solid than you imagined.

Coming in May — The Tea Planter's Secret

The Tea Planter's Secret is published at the end of May, and I can't wait to share it with you. It's a book I've poured my heart into, and I hope when you read it, you'll be transported to those misty tea-covered hills, to the echoing cloisters of Oxford, to a world both beautiful and troubling.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. Does wartime Sydney or Edwardian Ceylon call to you more strongly? I suspect some of you will say both, and honestly, I understand completely because that's exactly how I feel.