Author Talk - Leonie Kelsall at the Cobram Library

Leonie Kelsall, bestselling author of The Farm at Peppertree Crossing, The Wattle Seed Inn, The River Gum Cottage, The Willow Tree Wharf and The Blue Gum Camp is on her way to the Tatura Library. Leonie will visit Cobram Library on Wednesday 10th July at 11.00am to talk about her latest book The Homestead in the Eucalypts.

When student doctor Taylor Lawrence's city life is turned upside down, she seeks sanctuary on her grandparents' farm in the South Australian countryside. During the lonely nights, she fantasises of a time long-gone; of Anna, who, rising at dawn to milk the cows and fetch water from the well, is caught in a bushfire that threatens to leave her reputation as blackened as the surrounding bushland and of Anna's rescuer, fellow settler Luke Hartmann. Reality blurs as Taylor repeatedly escapes into Anna's world, and she realises she must discover whether her dreams are pure fantasy—or if they recount a story more familiar than she could ever imagine. Either way, it seems she'll end up with a broken mind or a broken heart. The problem is, Taylor is no longer sure which she would prefer.

Raised initially in a tiny, no-horse town on South Australia's Fleurieu coast, then in the slightly more populated wheat and sheep farming land at Pallamana, Léonie is a country girl through and through. Growing up without a television, she developed a love of reading before she reached primary school, swiftly followed by a desire to write. A registered wildlife rescuer and carer, she now divides her time between the lush Adelaide Hills, the location of her professional counselling practice, and the stark, arid beauty of the family farm at Pallamana, which provides both the setting for many of her stories and a refuge for the rescues that can't be released.