Girl from Mena Creek
By Grace Bogaert

A novel written around real events set between the 1920s - 40s.

Talia leaves the dry rocky mountainside of her Catalan village to lush Northern Queensland, to be reunited with her cane-cutter father, her only knowledge of the faraway country from a worn postcard.  On her first encounters with the land, she experiences the extremes of hardship and poverty, mixed with the delights of bountiful nature and kinship.  When the family moves to Mena Creek to work at Castillo Candela, the estate of another Spanish family, she witnesses opulence and privilege, but always from the outside looking in, never really belonging.  And when she falls in love for the first time, her lover too, is driven away from her.  But he can never really leave Talia, as he is imprinted on her heart, as deeply as Mena Creek flows through the landscape of her being.

Expected to be available for sale at the end of 2011.