The latest novel
The Transformation of Rowena Thornhill
Two strangers meet at a baggage carousel in Milan, and one of them is remade. A newly widowed businessman, a woman leaving a small life behind, and a stay in Italy that rearranges who holds the power, and what it costs.
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Sharyn Underhill came to fiction late, after twenty years of professional life and two children now grown and gone. She is in her fifties, which she mentions because the women in her books are rarely young and she is tired of pretending that reinvention belongs to people under thirty.
She lives in rural Tasmania. The bush there is not scenic; it is old, indifferent and hard on the unprepared, and she prefers it to gentler country. Weather does things to a landscape slowly and without asking, which is roughly what her novels are about.
The Transformation of Rowena Thornhill is her first — a story of domination and remaking, written to be taken seriously rather than enjoyed quickly, and set a long way from home, in Italy, where nobody knows anyone.