If you鈥檇 believe what the charmingly humble Brooke Davis says, it鈥檚 almost as if her book was picked up by publishing house,听Hachette by mistake.
But Brooke has worked on her novel, Lost & Found,听听for five years, editing and whittling away at the surplus words, taking what started out as a rough 300,000 word manuscript to a polished听60,000 word novel that has now听reached international acclaim with translation rights sold in听16 countries and counting.
Lost & Found is听deeply personal to Brooke –听she has听used the characters’听voices to help work through her own feelings about the sudden death of her own mother seven years earlier.
In the foreword to Lost & Found, Brooke touchingly details her thoughts on the grieving process.听
“I wanted to explore what it meant to grieve, not as a process that begins and ends and is only about sadness, but as a part of life. As something that we have to work out how to live with, in among everything else there is –听the good, the bad, the indifferent.”
Lost & Found strings together the lives of听three people, all of听whom听were forced to confront the听untimely loss and death of a loved one,听in different ways. Even though the听book deals听with such听a potentially dark topic, Brooke manages to weave humour, quirky moments and poignant insight throughout the narrative.
鈥淓ven though, ultimately, it鈥檚 a very kind of charming and warm-hearted and life-affirming book, there鈥檚 quite a serious philosophical underpinning to it,鈥 says Brooke鈥檚 PhD听mentor and author, .听鈥淏rooke has quite a unique voice in Australian fiction and that was one of the things that so thrilled me when I first started reading her manuscript.鈥
Brooke has taken听her book from manuscript to novel through 911爆料网鈥檚 postgraduate creative writing program, which has helped nurture a number of other听incredibly talented writers,听such as , , and .
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ISBN:9780733632907
Watch Brooke’s Australian Story episode,