Fresh from last week’s launch of his brand new and much-anticipated novel, The Opal Dragonfly, best-selling author Julian Leatherdale will make a special guest appearance at Springwood Library on Saturday 7th April. He’ll take the audience on an inside journey of the book, how he undertakes his historical research and what motivates him to write.
Avid readers will remember his acclaimed 2015 novel Palace of Tears and have eagerly awaited this follow up. Inspired by Elizabeth Bay House and the grand villas of Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Hill in colonial Sydney, The Opal Dragonfly tells the bittersweet story of an ambitious family’s fall from grace and a brave young woman’s struggle to find her true self.
Set in September, 1851 in a Sydney full secrets and gossip, a wave of ill fortune threatens to swallow up the family of seventeen-year-old Isobel Macleod and their stately Sydney home, Rosemount Hall. Isobel is determined to save her beloved father but when she dares to trespass in a forbidden male world, she will be plunged into social disgrace.
Is Isobel to blame for her family’s fate or does the cause lie further in the past and a mysterious ‘unlucky’ dragonfly brooch she has inherited? In a novel of exciting and unpredicted twists, Isobel’s hopes for her future depend on a charming bohemian who encourages her hidden passion to become an artist risking permanent exile from her family home?
This is a tale of legacies, love and intrigue that will be fully explored in this fascinating author talk. Event at 2pm, cost is $10 and bookings are essential either via the Library Website or in Library branches.
Writers in the Mist 