JG-Leaves-layered-shadow-half-size.png

The Other Wife

A beautiful cover – but there are dark secrets within.

Somehow I’ve managed to release three books this year. One has been as Janet Gover and two as Juliet Bell, which is the pen name for my collaborations with my friend Alison May.

Juliet Bell has an interest in misunderstood classic literature, and classic heroes who are maybe not so heroic… especially by today’s standards.

That being the case, you can probably guess the inspiration behind our second book – The Other Wife. I’m not going to put any spoilers here, but the cover and blurb will tell you that we have set our story in Australia from the 1960s to the 1980s.

This was a time of great change in my homeland, just as it was all over the world.

It was the sexual revolution and the arrival of the contraceptive pill for women. It was a time when Australia’s Aboriginal people were fighting for rights to the land taken by the white settlers.

This period also saw the beginning of the Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney and the eventual decriminalization of homosexual acts.

A Labor Party federal government took power for the first time in 23 years, and was controversially dismissed three years later, sparking a constitutional crisis.

Just as we chose to set our Wuthering Heights rewrite against the turmoil of the Thatcher years and the miners’ strike, so Australia’s equally tumultuous period seemed a great place for the next book.

The Heights – it’s had a fabulous reception – thank you everyone.

The new book’s title will give you a good idea of the novel that inspired this story… but we’ve gone quite a way out of the box for this one. Still we hope our Jane will reflect the same character that has made her namesake one of the most beloved characters in fiction.

You can read more about our Jane here..

For those who use e-readers, you can go ahead and click here if you think you might like The Other Wife.

Paperback readers – sorry, you’ll have to wait until January for the physical book.