Double Book Launch: Tasmania Bella & The Gospel Engine by Samuel Thawley

Join us when we welcome Samuel Thawley to celebrate the launch of his two new releases, Tasmania Bella and The Gospel Engine.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Tasmania Bella

Four unraveling women flee Sydney to a cliff-top house on Tasmania’s wild coast - one month to trade ambition for salt air, secrets for dawn swims, and old maps for new selves. Tasmania doesn’t just receive them. It reshapes them. And together they start to see new possibilities.

At first, the island offers what they seek - disconnection, distance, rest. But something deeper begins to stir. Windswept cliffs, shared meals, and dawn swims loosen their guard. Secrets rise. Desires shift. Each woman is drawn into her own reckoning: with grief, identity, intimacy, and the futures they still might choose.

Tasmania Bella is a lyrical, layered novel of friendship, desire, reinvention, and quiet transformation. It is about the maps we follow - and the ones we redraw. It is about exile chosen freely, and the wild edges of a landscape that press against our own. The island doesn’t just receive its four guests. It reshapes them. And when the month is over, none of them will return unchanged.

The Gospel Engine

A theology student builds a recursive AI to decode Scripture - unleashing academic panic, church resistance, and a question older than faith: Is pattern a truth… or a temptation? 

When a brilliant theology student develops a recursive AI to decode hidden patterns in Scripture, she triggers a firestorm of academic revolt, institutional panic - and something deeper. The Gospel Engine is a literary thriller that moves between manuscript archives, ecclesiastical politics, and the edges of belief itself. As church and state intervene, Miriam Voss must decide whether faith is memory, pattern, or possibility - and whether her Engine reveals truth or tempts heresy.

The novel is a literary work of uncommon ambition. It is as fluent in early Christian thought as it is in contemporary questions of recursion, machine learning, and epistemic trust. Yet its core remains personal - about a woman reckoning with what can be known, what should be remembered, and what must be let go.

Written with precision, reverence, and courage, The Gospel Engine offers something rare: a narrative that takes both theology and technology seriously, without flattening either. Profound and elegantly constructed, it speaks to believers and seekers alike - those drawn to Scripture, silence, and the question of what endures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samuel Thawley is a gold medal-winning olive oil producer based in Umbria, Italy. His roots however are in Canberra, growing up locally and attending The Australian National University.

He has written three novels and is now at work on two biographies. Outside of writing, he is an avid dancer and enthusiastic Japanese taiko drummer. 

Samuel’s books draw deeply from his lived experience - his grandfather’s career in the Church, his mother’s childhood in Tasmania, and his own decades spent travelling widely and building communities through events, social clubs, and hosting. Over forty years he has welcomed people of all ages and backgrounds, finding creative energy in the diversity of their stories. 

His most unusual brush with fame has been becoming the eponymous inspiration for a character and storyline in Downton Abbey.