A Clear Dusk Settles

Published 2018
$23.99 (incl postage & handling anywhere in Australia)  

Available now

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK:

I'm a school teacher writing a novel for young people (it’s also very accessible for older people!) because it’s the novel I always wanted to teach to fifteen year olds.

I've often been frustrated with the quality of fiction available for young people – and older ones, too. If it’s not laden with casual sex, depressing social brokenness or bad language, it’s often sticky-sweet pious, and just not real.

I was tired of not being able to find a novel for young people that expressed hope and reflected good values.

I wanted to write a novel for ordinary people that provided strong traditional values while not preaching at them. I wanted to smuggle Christian values into a secular novel. tried to bring the world of deep theological thought into daily life, without sounding like a preacher.

Beneath the surface of a simple story, there are deep themes of what it means to be truly human, to belong, to know the love of a Father. I’ve adapted the sense of longing that C. S. Lewis writes about, into a novel about ordinary people in an Australian setting that most readers around the world will find fascinating and intriguing. This book is my fictional response to C. S. Lewis’s most famous sermon, The Weight of Glory.

PLOT: The main character is a young woman who is a University student at Oxford. Part of her family lore is that there is some family secret hidden in Tasmania, the small, rural island to the south of the Australian mainland. But details are sketchy. No-one knows the details. Deep inside herself, she nurses a desire to find her true home. She decides to go to Tasmania to try to find out the family secret and also perhaps to find herself.

GENRE: This is a Human Interest / Romance novel. But it is quite different from your standard easy-reading novels.

I've tried to bring a depth to the writing that is absent in many similar titles. See my Guide for Teachers to give more of an insight into this element.

THEME: In a culture where it is just normal for young people to experience serial sexual encounters as part of their social life, this book stands as a reminder that this is not the only way for young people to live. I've tried to show my heroine and several others in the novel thinking their way into loving relationships rather than just plunging into yet another physical experience. They make choices based on good values, and preserve their humanity by doing so.

Another element of the story concerns the way in which wishes and prayers expressed almost a century earlier may come to fruit even beyond the lifespan of those making them. I wanted to leave the reader at the last page of the novel sitting quietly and mulling over the mystery and the marvel of life – and the potential scope and power of their own prayers.

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