Wrapping up the When She Was Gone book tour (part one!)

Where to begin?! I’ve had such a ball chatting to readers about When She Was Gone over the last few weeks, across WA and in Sydney and the Blue Mountains. I’m also full of gratitude to all the supportive bookstores and libraries, as well as the many writers who have come out to support me, both in the audience and by hosting in-conversations at different events. We have such a lovely, warm writing community and it was a special treat to say hello to old writer friends and make new ones at Better Read Than Dead last night, where Anna Downes hosted a fantastic conversation, and a lovely group also came out to dinner afterwards!

You can find lots more of my tour photos over on Instagram (@sarafosterauthor)

So what’s coming next?

This feels like the end of the main promo period, but in fact I still have lots of events to come. I’m really excited to be a guest author at Rachael Johns’ and Anthea Hodgson’s bookclub retreat next weekend, as this is another lovely writer-reader community (ticket sales closed for this one). Then there’s the York writers festival, and I also have events coming up in June/July at The Lane Bookshop, Mandurah, Stefen’s bookshop, and more later in the year. Some of these are already up on my website, and more details will be announced shortly for others. I’ll make sure you can find everything on the website and here.

I’m also helping to launch Dervla McTiernan’s new novel The Unquiet Grave in Joondalup on 22 May. Dervla has just won the ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year for What Happened to Nina?, announced a TV adaptation of the same book, and is topping bestseller charts all over the place with this new Cormac Reilly novel. We will have a LOT to talk about!

I’m still watching The Handmaid’s Tale – are you?!

I’ve had a chat running here on Substack in case anyone else is avidly watching the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the chat is very quiet – other than a couple of watchers letting me know they’d decided to switch off. If you’re still going I’d love to hear your thoughts. I think it’s one of the best series I’ve ever watched, but the darkness has been very hard to take at times, and the latest episode was no different. The murky questions aren’t just around the superb moral conundrums in the story itself, but there’s also a really interesting conversation to be had about what happens when we grow numb to shocking scenes: which is really culturally relevant when our kids/teens/all of us are now so easily exposed to all sorts of horrendous stuff on the internet (and the ongoing imagery of war). How do we continue to engage when engagement is a repeatedly traumatic experience? And what happens when we start to self-protect by sanitising stories or switching off? I’m keen to discuss these kinds of issues and I’ll put a new chat up about the latest episode of THT shortly.

Back to writing

In some of my talks I’ve mentioned the half-finished book I’m working on next, in which my characters come from a town that performs an annual Agatha Christie play, but after the last play there was a murder… It’s way too early to give you a proper blurb yet, but I can’t wait to get back to it as I’ve had a lot of ideas over the last couple of months – along with thoughts around some other books too. So if I’m a partial hermit soon, you can be sure that I’m busy scribbling away somewhere and trying to make sense of my own thoughts and ideas!

Coming soon on Substack

I’m turning into a short-form substack addict so I’m going to be putting up some extra posts as I go along when I’ve written more things I want to share. Watch out for a Mother’s Day short essay from me on Sunday, and if you’re celebrating I hope you have a lovely day. And if it’s a day that’s not so easy for you, then I’m sending care and compassion your way too.

Until next time, happy reading!

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PS This is the first post I’ve ever written on my phone as I’m at the airport - if it works well and looks formatted on email then this is very useful, so fingers crossed!