In Conversation with Michelle Johnston

Join us in conversation with Michelle Johnston as we delve deeper into her new book 'The Revisionists'

Michelle is not only a gifted writer but also a senior emergency department doctor at a major Perth hospital. Her latest novel was inspired by extraordinary firsthand experiences during her research. She travelled through Dagestan, shortly after it was listed as “do not travel” by DFAT. She was detained by the FSB, stranded in remote mountain villages, and witnessed the heartbreaking impact of conflict on families in the North Caucasus.

Michelle is a captivating speaker with incredible stories to share, both from her travels and her work on the medical frontlines.

About the book:

Gripping, propulsive and intelligent, The Revisionists is a tour de force, an absorbing, unputdownable novel about ambition - and how we curate our own stories and rescript our memories in order to survive.

Upper East Side, Manhattan, 2023: Christine Campbell, former journalist, turns on the television to watch a documentary paying homage to her Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted coverage of the unrest in 1999 in the North Caucasus. She is newly widowed, wealthy, and attempting to write a memoir celebrating her bold life and significant achievements in writing about the silencing of women during conflict.

But truth has a way of resurfacing, even when buried deep beneath money, memory, and reinvention. When Dr Frankie Pearson, Christine's oldest - and estranged - friend, knocks on her door, the pair must reconcile their memories and come to terms with the far-reaching and disastrous decisions they both made over twenty years ago. What really happened in that small mountain village in Dagestan in the dying days of the millennium, while Christine was hellbent on getting the scoop of a lifetime?

An elegant, thrilling and brilliantly compelling novel of the consequences of the conflict between a person's principles and their desire for acclaim, The Revisionists examines the malleability of memory and the slippery nature of the truth - and the lengths that people will go to avoid facing both.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Johnston is both an emergency physician and an author. She is a Staff Specialist at the Royal Perth Hospital Emergency Department, a busy inner-city trauma centre where she works as both clinician and teacher. She speaks and holds workshops, for both doctors and normal people, about marrying critical care and creativity, and she is occupied searching for the beauty and awe in an often-brutal reality