I’m furiously writing a new novel about a young woman called Aulani who has a strange life-story. The power of belief, both hers and that of other people, plays a big part in what happens to her. It is set mainly in Papua New Guinea (where I lived and worked for 15 years, my second home) and where many people still believe in sorcery.
I’m writing it furiously because I can’t wait to get back to my Dani stories and I still have the last two novels to write in that series (the next one also set in PNG) . So why did I decide to write this one in the middle? Haven’t got a clue, it just arrived on the page i.e. on to the lappie in a google doc, possibly inspired by people’s entrenched views on Brexit that don’t seem to shift as well as by the way Cambridge Analytica has manipulated people's beliefs via their Facebook accounts.
Entrenched views and the difficulties of changing them are prevalent worldwide but what seems evil is when powerful people manipulate the views of others for their own ends. So that’s what my new novel is about – not Brexit but the way the powerful few manipulate the crowd for their own hidden agendas. There are always victims just like Aulani, but she learns how to be tough and she manages to turn her fate around.
This is an extract from my bookchat post on Hastings Online Times for Tuesday 23 July, 2019. 'You tell the stories your way - life writing as only you know how.'
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