Hello dear Joy Risers,
For the first time in four years, I’m going on Australian tour with a new novel! And I want you to be the first to know about it.
I think every cell in my body is alive with the joy of having this to look forward to, and the honour and privilege of receiving this support for my work. It’s a miraculous thing to feel the awe and wonder of knowing that Maggie, who began as an idea on a morning walk in August 2022, is about to take me around Australia. Which, as a fact, undoes me in itself: I wrote this book about belonging, memory, time, first love, and what it takes to come home to ourselves and each other … and now this story is going to take me on tour, bring us together, to gather in cities and towns from east to west, across this island continent that is our home.
Dear Reader, I am forking beside myself.
Okay, focus, Ringles.
Here’s the lowdown:
I’m doing 18 events from end of August through September!
Maggie’s story has lived in the private, strange, shimmering place that is my inner country, where stories live before they become books. I’ve drawn her life from my soul and muscles and nervous system as I’ve travelled from Lyme Regis to London to Queensland following her gingerbread trail. She’s lived in notebooks, Word documents, voice memos, early morning anxieties, late night hopes, at the bottom of heartrending research rabbit holes, in the pauses between songs on The Cranberries albums, in the dusty corners of memory, and in Australian magpie songs, curlew wails, fossils found on the Jurassic Coast, lifelong gemstone obsessions, crushed tea-tree leaves, lightning – and remembering first love that marks us for the rest of our lives. Not to mention the hours of conversations with people closest to me, all midwives of my imagination and Maggie herself.
Soon, Maggie gets to live with you too. And I get to come and talk with you about her.
No matter the half dozen times or more I’ve gone on tours, this remains gobsmacking to me.
That I get to sit in theatres, libraries, bookshops, cinemas, wineries, churches, sailing clubs, and hotels and have conversations with you about this novel. About the places that made it. About the questions beneath the surface of this story that would not leave me alone. About coming home to the parts of ourselves we might once thought we had to bury.
I get to sign your books. To meet some of you for the first time. To see some of your familiar faces again.
I get to be reminded, in the most embodied way, that books are not finished when the final full stop is typed. They begin in the space between writer and reader. They begin when the story leaves me and finds you.
I know from privileged experience that touring is big. It is beautiful and electric and body-rattling too, and I am going to look after myself better than ever before while I do this tour - my biggest yet. What will keep me going, what lights me up from the inside, is the thought of these spaces we are going to gather in and the energy we’re going to fill them with together. These conversations. These bookshops. These cities. This story, finally with you.
Because as I’ve said this book is about coming home. And this tour feels like a homecoming too. It’s a personal hope that it can be that, in some way, for all of us.
If I’m touring anywhere near where you are, I so hope you can join me. And if you know someone in one of my tour stops who loves my books, or who might be drawn to Maggie’s story, I’d be so grateful if you shared this letter with them.
If you can’t make an event but want Maggie in your hands ASAP, preorders are available now in Australia and New Zealand.
I’ll leave you with these lines from The World Beneath Her Feet that feel like a little lantern for this moment:
I am singing this story out to you now. I hope so much I’ll see you on the road!
With a light left on, always,
All of my author photos are credit to the wonderful Holly Bobbins.
Cover artwork is by the incredible Laura Moriarty designed by the magnificent Hazel Lam.
My tour is happening with unending thanks to my publishers, HarperCollins Australia, and to the big-hearted network of bookstores, booksellers and venues around Australia who are hosting me and incredible women who are moderating our conversations - all details are on my website: www.hollyringland.com/myevents.
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