Author In-Conversation: Holly Ringland

From award-winning author Holly Ringland comes a luminous novel about memory, belonging and the loves and landscapes that make us. Join us in-conversation with Holly as we explore her latest book, The World Beneath Her Feet.

This event is brought to you in partnership with Dymocks Booksellers. Books will be available to purchase on the night from Dymocks booksellers and Holly will be signing books after the in-conversation.

About the Book:

With Ringland’s signature lyrical prose, evocative depictions of the natural world and her ability to layer humour and darkness, The World Beneath Her Feet is an immersive and absorbing novel which blends Ringland’s love of nature, music and art with her deep affection for Australian landscapes. In many ways, this is Ringland’s most personal novel yet.

Ringland said: The World Beneath Her Feet is a novel from the core of my heart, mirroring many things I’ve been contemplating in the last few years: the parts of ourselves we bury in order to survive, the unresolved past that can shape the rest of our lives, and the people and places that call us home. I hope Maggie Byrd’s journey reminds readers that even after heartbreak, guilt and years of silence, it is still possible – no matter how unlikely – to find unexpected treasure in what we’ve left behind, if we have the courage to unearth it and allow it to enrich who we’ve become.’

When the novel opens, Maggie Byrd is in her late thirties and living a charmed life in London. She works with fossils and gems at the Natural History Museum and shares a home with the two people she loves most: her best friend, Harriet, and her partner, Joe. However, beneath this carefully constructed façade lies a past Maggie buried deep inside herself and resolved never to unearth: the story of a guilt-ridden, heartbroken girl who left Australia in her early twenties and swore never to return. When she learns that she's inherited her beloved uncle's rewilded land in a lush valley of southeast Queensland, Maggie's London life begins to fracture.

About the Author:

Holly Ringland is a writer, storyteller and TV presenter whose books have sold over 600,000 copies globally and been published in 30 international territories. Ringland’s 2018 debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted into a smash-hit seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver. In 2021, Holly co-hosted an eight-episode ABC TV series, Back to Nature, with Aaron Pedersen. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh/Bundjalung regions of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, in her ‘office’, a vintage caravan named Frenchie. Upon publication, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding became an instant national bestseller, and it was named Booktopia’s 2022 Book of the Year. In 2023, Holly published her first non-fiction book, the national bestseller The House That Joy Built, about the essential power of creativity, something she continues to write about in her beloved and bestselling Substack The Joy Rise.