New Triskele Book Release - The Swooping Mapgie

"Heartbreaking drama of lost innocence, deceit and a scandal that shook Australia." Jill's Book Cafe

Cover by JD Smith Design

It is difficult for any Australian born after the feminist movement to understand the plight of being sixteen, pregnant and unmarried in 1970. The sanctity of marriage was still the vital cornerstone of society and it was impossible to envisage raising a child outside this union blessed by church and state.

For a girl bringing such disgrace to her family, it was an unforgiving world. Rather than being able to rejoice at bringing forth this new life, these girls were shunted into a world of shame –– hidden at home or sent interstate to homes for unmarried mothers.

But The Swooping Magpie isn't simply the story of a society refusing support to mothers battling to raise an infant alone. It also exposes the brutal adoption industry practices that targeted healthy newborns for infertile couples.

1970s photo from the collections of the Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society

Until the mid-70s it was common practice to adopt out the babies of unwed mothers. In the 1960s, Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital was one of largest sources of Australia’s adopted babies. Patient documents from Crown Street and other maternity hospitals show that from the moment most unmarried girls arrived, their records were marked “for adoption”.

From 1950 – 1980, an estimated 250,000 girls had their newborns taken. Many claimed they were duped into signing paperwork whilst under postpartum sedation, or made to feel selfish if they kept their babies. Forced to pay this terrible price for pregnancy outside marriage, thousands of women harboured their grief, in silence, for decades.

Photo courtesy of Camille Perrat

We might ask ourselves how these women survived. Did they “just forget about it and get on with their lives” as urged by an arrogant and punitive society? The stories I heard demonstrate that frequently, the trauma of their loss never left them. Made to feel unworthy and unfit, they developed psychological problems. Some never married. Some never gave birth again.

The Swooping Magpie is on NEW RELEASE promo for only 99c/p from your favourite retailer:

https://books2read.com/u/bMQdr7

If you'd like to read book 1 (a standalone) in this 1970s Aussie family drama series, The Silent Kookaburra is also available at your favourite retailer.

Cover by JD Smith Design

"Unsettling psychological suspense blending the intensity of Wally Lamb with the atmosphere of Peter James, this story will get under your skin..."

Photo courtesy of Camille Perrat

Photo courtesy of Camille Perrat

Happy reading!

Story of a Novel: The Silent Kookaburra by Liza Perrat

 The Silent Kookaburra began its life as Hosing Venetian Blinds, over ten years before it was finally published. So, why did I write it and why did it take so long to see the light of day?

Basically, it was a nostalgic trip down the Memory Lane of my childhood growing up in 1970s Wollongong, New South Wales.

I wrote Hosing Venetian Blinds, then rewrote it over and over, but for reasons unknown to me, I could not “get it right”. Or as “right” as a novel ever will be. More and more dissatisfied with each draft, on I slogged until one wintery afternoon in 2007, when a phone call interrupted my writing.

It was the Gendarmes of Grenoble informing me that my husband had suffered a nasty heart attack on the ski slopes and wasn’t expected to survive. Well, that was all I needed to completely abandon the novel. Onto a hard disk it went, with the vow that it would never see the light of day.

Luckily my husband made a complete recovery and eventually I began writing again. But still I couldn’t face rewriting Hosing Venetian Blinds; couldn’t stop equating the novel with that awful period of my life.

The Bone Angel Trilogy Boxset

 So for the next few years I plunged into a French historical fiction trilogy: The Bone Angel : Three heart-wrenching adventures of three midwife-healers during the Black Plague (Blood Rose Angel), French Revolution (Spirit of Lost Angels) and Nazi-occupied France (Wolfsangel).

Once the third story was published I began taking peeks at Hosing Venetian Blinds again. Then I reread it closely and voilà, immediately saw what I thought was “wrong” with the story. I rewrote, and published it, within a year.

Even though the book tackles some very dark and disturbing topics, it was fun travelling back to my childhood and teen years, seeing my friends, revisiting those familiar places, most notably the beach.

Sulphur-crested cockatoo

 The city has changed a lot since the 70s, but I’m still fond of Wollongong, and love going back there on my yearly pilgrimage home to Australia (I have lived in France for the past 25 years).

Fortunately for me, my childhood wasn’t burdened with the same terrible dramas as my fictional character, Tanya. However, I could readily identify with her, as that was the case for some people I knew.

Wollongong has a large European migrant community, attracted to the area post WW2 with the offer of work at the Port Kembla Steelworks, which, at that time, was the backbone of Wollongong.

One of my very first jobs, at age fourteen, was distributing grocery store pamphlets into letter boxes in this area. Not the long-term career I envisaged, but it earned me enough to buy my first car at age seventeen –– and my independence –– the day I got my licence. So, at five am every weekday, my lovely father would help me distribute these advertising pamphlets into the letterboxes of Cringila, and this cosmopolitan community piqued my interest. I wanted to know more about them; where they came from, what their lives were like. That prompted me to include the Italian migrant aspect of The Silent Kookaburra.

So why this title, when the kookaburra is anything but silent? Well, that’s just it: what might happen if your friendly backyard kookaburra does fall silent?

I’m pleased that The Silent Kookaburra has been well-received by readers and garnered some lovely reviews, and very glad I stuck with it to the bitter end! I’m currently working on the next novel, also set in 1970s Wollongong. And there will hopefully be a third in this new trilogy of standalone novels.


Extract from The Silent Kookaburra...

Chapter 1

2016

Knuckles blanch, distend as my hand curves around the yellowed newspaper pages and my gaze hooks onto the headlines.

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY. January 26th, 1973. 165-year anniversary of convict ships arriving in Sydney.

Happy? What a cruel joke for that summer. The bleakest, most grievous, of my life.

I can’t believe my grandmother kept such a reminder of the tragedy which flayed the core of our lives; of that harrowing time my cursed memory refuses to entirely banish.

Shaky hands disturb dust motes, billowing as I place the heat-brittled newspaper back into Nanna Purvis’s box.

I try not to look at the headline but my gaze keeps flickering back, bold letters more callous as I remember all I’d yearned for back then, at eleven years old, was the simplest of things: a happy family. How elusive that happiness had proved.

I won’t think about it anymore. I mustn’t, can’t! But as much as I wrench away my mind, it strains back to my childhood.

Of course fragments of those years have always been clear, though much of my past is an uncharted desert –– vast, arid, untamed.

Psychology studies taught me this is how the memory magician works: vivid recall of unimportant details while the consequential parts –– those protective breaches of conscious recollection –– are mined with filmy chasms.

I swipe the sweat from my brow, push the window further open.

Outside, the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean is still a pale glow but already it has baked the ground a crusty brown. Shelley’s gum tree is alive with cackling kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets shrieking and swinging like crazy acrobats, eucalyptus leaves twisted edge-on to avoid the withering rays.

But back in my childhood bedroom, behind Gumtree Cottage’s convict-built walls, the air is even hotter, and foetid with weeks of closure following my parents’ deaths.

Disheartened by the stack of cardboard boxes still to sift through, uneasy about what other memories their contents might unearth, I rest back on a jumble of moth-frayed cushions.

I close my eyes to try and escape the torment, but there is no reprieve. And, along with my grandmother’s newspaper clipping, I swear I hear, in the rise and dump of its swell, the sea pulling me back to that blistering summer of over forty years ago.


Amazon Reviews:

Compelling psychological drama that delves into the dark heart of family secrets. Chris Curran, author of Amazon bestseller, Mindsight.

An amazing domestic thriller with a gripping storyline, vivid dialogue, a palpable sense of place and time, and a compelling cast of characters that I can't get out of my head. Carol Cooper, Contemporary Women's Fiction author.

I have to say this was one of the most compelling reads I have read. Carol Ravensdale, reader.

... nothing better than a good twist or two in a plot, but this was a first for me - one final hammer dropping on the very last page that made my jaw drop! Cindy Taylor, BookBlogger.

... as well-written psychological thrillers often do, it makes you question everything you thinkyou know, culminating in a true twist of an ending that both shocks and makes you ask "Why didn't I figure this out sooner?" Courtney J. Hall, historical fiction, romance and contemporary author.

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What We Read This Summer

As this summer draws to a close, the Triskele girls compare what they read on the beach, in a mountain chalet, lounging in the garden, or wherever ...

Here are a few recommendations from each of us:

Liza:

Close to Me by Amanda Reynolds: gripping psychological drama where a woman falls down the stairs at home, and wakes up in hospital having lost a whole year of memories. Then she begins to remember...

Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant: Despite the fact that most of the characters are unlikeable, I found this another unputdownable psychological suspense story, perfectly evoking the heat and oppression of one Greek summer.

Gillian:

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris: Highlight of the year for me, loved the eerie quality of the book, unsure if what you were reading was fact or fiction. The author has a talent for creating complex characters which worked well in this novel. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys the latest trend of psychological thrillers with a twist.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier: Bit late to this classic, I know. But following a visit to The Lizard in Cornwall in June this year, and having stood gazing out across Frenchman's Creek, I decided to work my way through Du Maurier's catalogue, starting with the darkly captivating Rebecca. I love the author's style, the use of location and the edge of tension she keeps running without. Can't wait for the next one!

Jill:

The Mirror World of Melody Black by Gavin Extence. Hard to categorise as the initial lightness of tone gives way to much darker layers. Abby pops round to a neighbour's flat to borrow a tin of tomatoes, but he's dead. This episode and her pragmatic reaction - she smokes two cigarettes, calls the police and takes the tomatoes anyway - soon leads the reader to realise Abby has problems relating to the world. Fascinating, well written and a curious insight into managing bipolar disorder.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty. No surprise this won The Booker. A book which makes the impossible plausible and in doing so, holds up the harshest of lights to illuminate our broken civilisation. Dickens, where Sellout was born and raised by a terrifyingly obsessive father, has been wiped off the map. But he has an idea how to get it back. By re-instituting slavery. A book to make you laugh and gasp, but most of all, think.

Kat:

I've picked two books about as different from one another as it is possible to be. The first is Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged by Ayisha Malik. Sophia Khan wears skinny jeans, smokes, swears, has issues with deadlines and agonises about getting fat while scoffing muffins and lemon puffs. So far, so Bridget Jones. On the other hand, she wears a hijab, doesn’t drink alcohol, prays five times a day and has no intention of having sex before marriage. This is romantic comedy with real heart. Do not expect this to end with Sophia ripping off her hijab and going on a binge. Nor with her settling down to be a ‘traditional’ submissive wife. This is about how you can be modern, independent, strong-minded – and still a faithful Muslim. Something most Muslim women have always known; Malik is just letting the rest of us in on the secret.

The second is not exactly your typical beach read, but in the current state of the world, it could hardly be more important. In Why I Am No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge addresses (among other things) the erasure of Black Britons from British history, the nature of White Privilege, the failure of White Feminism to engage with issues of racism, the often overlooked intersections of race with class – and what white people should be doing to tackle racism. I want to put this book into the hands of every good-hearted, liberal-minded white person I know and say, ‘please read this; please try and understand. We are all complicit, but we don’t have to be.'

Jane:

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell: This was a wonderfully written book. You think you know the end, you think you know all the answers; you think the conclusion obvious. But as you race through the pages, you realise there's more to Ellie's disappearance, and the secrets unfold to the very end. Serious page turning material. 

If anyone has read a book they particularly enjoyed this summer, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section!