THE TRUTH HER MOTHER NEVER TOLD HER: SUE WOOLFE ON HER POWERFUL NEW NOVEL

Acclaimed author Sue Woolfe

What if the person you love most never told you the truth about their childhood?

Award-winning Australian author Sue Woolfe returns with her first novel in eight years, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves, a powerful and deeply moving exploration of family secrets, intergenerational trauma, creativity and resilience.

At its heart is a question that resonates with countless Australian families: what happens when painful histories remain unspoken?

The question is a deeply personal one for Sue. Long after her mother's death, she discovered that the woman who had claimed to attend an exclusive convent school had in fact spent her childhood in an abusive orphanage and carried the shame and trauma of that experience throughout her life.

That discovery became the inspiration for The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves.

"Do you have someone in your family who is tight-lipped about their childhood?" says Sue. "They may be holding in their hearts a secret that is too hard to bear."

The novel follows Frances, an internationally celebrated composer whose joyful music has captivated audiences worldwide. But when a persistent biographer demands to know where her creativity comes from, Frances is forced to confront the memories she has spent a lifetime trying to understand.

As she revisits her childhood, Frances uncovers a hidden family history that reaches back to one of Australia's abusive orphanages and reveals the devastating impact of trauma across generations.

Part family mystery and part exploration of memory, creativity and resilience, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves shines a light on the Australians whose stories were never spoken aloud and the generations left to live with the consequences.

Structured with the emotional resonance of a symphony, the novel moves between past and present as Frances pieces together the fragments of her family's history while searching for answers about her mother, herself and the origins of her music.

Between 1920 and 1970, more than half a million Australian children were placed in orphanages and children's homes.

Many were not actually orphans, and many experienced abuse, neglect and profound hardship.

Countless survivors never spoke about what happened to them, even to their own families. The legacy of those institutions continues to be felt in families across Australia today.

One of Australia's most acclaimed literary voices, Sue is uniquely placed to tell this story.

The author of the bestselling and award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity and the internationally acclaimed Painted Woman, she has spent decades exploring the relationship between creativity, memory and human experience through both fiction and research.

Alongside her celebrated literary career, Woolfe has become a leading voice on creativity and the brain, publishing widely on neuroscience and artistic practice and teaching creative writing and creativity studies at institutions including the University of Sydney, NIDA and the Australian National University.

Timely, moving and profoundly insightful, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves explores the stories families keep hidden, the trauma that can echo across generations, and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.

The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is available now from leading bookstores and online retailers.

About Sue Woolfe: Sue Woolfe is one of Australia’s most distinguished literary voices, internationally published and widely awarded. Her novel Leaning Towards Infinity won the Christina Stead Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (regional) and became a long-running bestseller. Alongside her fiction, Woolfe has written influential works on creativity and the brain which explore the relationship between artistic practice and human experience.

About Popcorn Press: Popcorn Press is the Fiction imprint of Fair Play Publishing, which was established in 2016 by Bonita Mersiades, who is also the founder of the Manly Writers’ Festival. As well as Popcorn Press, Fair Play Books is dedicated to sports non-fiction, and Pepper Press publishes books about life.