During the last few months while I’ve been dealing with my dying father, a friend and one of my cousins have been having great success and publishing novels.

Elsie King

Elsie King (aka Lynne Wong), has had her second historical romance novel published this year: A Suitable Bride. Her first novel, A Suitable Heir, was published in July last year. Both are great reads and capture the Regency period brilliantly. They are both extremely well written, and even though I’m not a great fan of romance novels, they both held my attention throughout, and I loved the characters and settings. A third book is well on the way too and will be published in 2025.

Alison Edwards

My cousin Alison (who is much younger than me because her father — my uncle — is only 18 months older than me) has lived in the UK and the Netherlands for quite a few years now, and returned to Australia last month for a book tour for her novel: Two Daughters. She is now back in Amsterdam, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Alison knows both the south coast of NSW and Cambridge very well, having grown up in one and been educated in the other. I read the novel quickly, but with so much going on in my life at the time, I couldn’t give it the attention it deserved, so I’m now reading it again. I’ll give it a proper review later, but for now let’s just say I enjoyed it, and thought it was a very clever and well-written novel.