AUTHOR Kim Lock has released her fourth novel, The Other Side of Beautiful, which follows a “vulnerable misfit” as she is forced to re-engage with the world following a tragedy.
Ms Lock is a former Barossa Valley resident and finished the book while still living in Lyndoch early last year.
She said it had been an exciting couple of weeks, following the novel’s release for this month.
“It was actually a relief when it was released – I woke up and thought the countdown is over,” she said.
“This was the quickest first draft I’ve ever written. A first draft usually take some 12 months; this took me three, the difference being for this one being I put everything else off.
“It came on the back of a rejection...so I threw all caution to the wind with this book and thought I’m just going to write something that makes me happy, makes me laugh.”
In The Other Side of Beautiful, character Mercy Blain is an agoraphobic women who has not left her house in two years.
When tragedy strikes and her house burns down, she finds herself reluctantly heading off on a road trip from Adelaide to Darwin.
“The main character suffers from anxiety, she hasn’t left her house and she has panic attacks, and I didn’t realise how much anxiety is the part of the novel people have connected with, until they’ve come back and told me,” Ms Lock said.
“I had a reviewer the other day say the book gave them hope, which I felt was amazing.”
Ms Lock said she was able to draw on her own experience with anxiety when writing her latest novel.
“Anxiety is something that came up for me five or six years ago, around the time of my second novel...to the point it did become quite hard for me to leave the house,” she said.
“That went for a year or two, not quite to the extent my character experienced but it’s something that had never been in my life before and was a real surprise for me.
“So when I wrote this character, I drew on a lot of my own physical sensations and how it manifested to me, the thought patterns and all of the what-ifs.”
The Other Side of Beautiful is published by Harper Collins and is available for sale online, at most major department stores, as well as local bookstores, such as The Raven’s Parlour at Tanunda.
Ms Lock moved “back home” to Mount Gambier at the end of last year to be closer to family.
Her other published works include Peace, Love and Khaki Socks, Like I Can Love, and The Three of Us.