Amanda Geard has proven herself a master of evocative, triple timeline mysteries, linking generations across the abandoned clues of family history. A faded photograph…. An abandoned house. And a wartime mystery that might have remained buried forever.
Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on the Binge Reading show this week, Amanda talks about her latest book, The Moon Gate, telling a story that reaches from wartime Britain to Tasmania and back to Ireland. And she shares the timeline story that first captivated, her imagination, and inspired her to swap jobs. from being a geologist in the world’s far off corners, to a fictional author who’s immediately attracted positive reviews.
This week’s GiveawayOur Giveaway this week is Fall Romance Freebies for the month of September, including Sadie’s Vow Book #1 in my latest trilogy Home At Last. You’ve got a library full of great romances here on offer, and you can select however many you like and Download For Free.
And remember if you enjoy the show. leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.
DOWNLOAD FREE ROMANCE Things discussed in this episodeListowel Writer’s Week: https://writersweek.ie/
What Amanda is reading:
Louise Fein: People Like Us: https://www.louisefein.com/people-like-us
The Echoes of Love Jenny Ashcroft: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-echoes-of-love-jenny-ashcroft
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31122.I_Capture_the_Castle
Where To Find Amanda Online
Website: www.amandageard.com
Instagram and X: @AmandaGeard
Introducing author Amanda GeardJenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Amanda.
Hello there, Amanda, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Amanda Geard: Hi, Jenny. Thanks so much for having me.
Jenny Wheeler: Amanda, The Moon Gate, which is your second historical timeline mystery refers to a particularly striking architectural feature in an old house in Ireland. It has both symbolic and real significance to the story. Tell us about The Moon Gate.
Amanda Geard: Thanks, Jenny. Yes. Gosh, I love moon gates. They’re these wonderful follies that are often found in Chinese gardens. But the idea was of course pinched and went around the world with the British Empire, and so you see them in a lot of old British gardens.
And they’re a circular structure, mostly often made of stone or brick, but timber as well, or willow wicks, but the idea is that they separate one part of the garden from another, but they rise up out of the earth.
And, the mentality is that to walk through one is to be reborn. I really wanted to put one of these in what became called The Moon Gate because one of my protagonists, Grace, who’s a young woman who leaves Grosvenor Square in London just before the outbreak of World War Two.
She travels to Tasmania, where I’m from originally, and she sheds her skin there. And actually the Moon Gate is in the house there at, at the back of the house there in Tasmania, between the small garden around the house and this wild rainforest.
She captures her own wilderness, I think. It was just this lovely lovely symbol I wanted to weave in.
Organising a Moon Gate Tour? There’s a thought!Jenny Wheeler: And are there any actual moon gates in Tasmania?
Amanda Geard: Oh, I think there are some in some private gardens.
And then here in Ireland, I really want to do a moon gate tour. And I’ve been collecting a very short list of moon gates, but some people in the UK who’ve read the book have sent me pictures of moon gates in their nearby big houses, or a lot of people have them in their gardens now as well.
They’ve built them from all kinds of things. I love the ones where people have taken rounds of logs and built them up into an archway that’s round and then grown ivy up it. It’s all very romantic.
Jenny Wheeler: Have you set up a moon gate tour?
Amanda Geard: No, but I think it’d be a great business idea. I’m on it.
Jenny Wheeler: The Moon Gate moves through three timelines, as you’ve mentioned, just immediately prior to World War II and your heroine is sent off to Tasmania to avoid the dangers of the bombs, then Tasmania, and then coming back to Ireland and London. All of these places have very special significance for you, don’t they?
Tell us about them.
Amanda Geard: They do Jenny. And yeah, the book is a real tangled web, of these places and times. So just for readers out there haven’t read it yet, it’s set during the war and the 1970s and the modern timelines in 2005. Most of the 1940s is set in the home front in Tasmania.
I was born in and grew up in Tasmania and studied there and my family’s still there and I go back every year and I love Tasmania, but I didn’t know anything about the war there at all because, we learned, really at school, the British side of World War Two, so it was hard work finding out about Tassie during, the war and the feeling there.
Yes, so Tasmania and London, I lived in for quite a few years on a houseboat and the houseboat features in the book although I have moved it across a couple of canals and now I live in Ireland down here in the southwest in County Kerry right on the Atlantic.
Captivated by Kate Morton in Cameroon…And I wove that place into The Moon Gate. It’s not such a big setting as it was for The Midnight House but it felt like a really lovely connection to have. The place, this, new place that I live and love in both of the novels.
Jenny Wheeler: It does fit extremely well. Can you remember the first dual timeline story that captivated you? Both of these books are very deeply embedded in that whole nostalgic feeling of family generational secrets. And I share that love of those kind of stories. Do you remember the first one that captivated you?
Amanda Geard: Yes, I think it was probably The Forgotten Garden. I’m sure many of your listeners and readers have read it, by Kate Morton. Because I remember reading that.
I actually listened to the audio book way back and I’m a geologist, so I was working in Cameroon out in the jungle. You’d be out all day collecting samples. doing long walks, sweating, coming back, have your bucket wash have your food from the fire, hop into the hammock and then, put the earbuds in and, or they weren’t earbuds then, normal earphones and get swept away, to Australia and Cornwall, where she set it.
And I loved it. It really suited my brain, jumping back and around the timelines and trying to find these little links. And I think I’ve read it once since in hard copy. And I loved remembering and I love the little almost Easter eggs. It’s probably not the quite the right word, but the hints all the way through that you pick up the next time you read it.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s fantastic. She’s another Australian writer, I think, isn’t she?
Amanda Geard: She is, I think she’s Australia’s biggest export, when it comes to writing, And her writing is, wow, it’s just incredible. So very beautiful writer.
Tassie’s part in World War IIJenny Wheeler: As you mentioned the World War II part is set in Tasmania and probably not a lot of people know what actually happened to anyone in Tasmania during the Second World War. Tell us about digging out that history.
Amanda Geard: Oh, it was yes, it was tough I went back to Tassie and visited my family and, went to the Launceston library and Hobart library and trying to dig out. I really love reading diaries and letters and personal stories, but there’s not a huge amount and certainly not available online.
As I was searching before I got back, but mum knows a Marion Sargent, who’s a historian there in Launceston, and she was brilliant. She was so generous. She sent me memories from her own father’s time in the war and during the war.
And they were a real springboard and some of these stories he’d written about the usual story of people changing their age, boys changing their age to join up. And there’s one particular battalion, the 40th who went to Darwin and onto Timor and Daniel, he joins up this battalion.
I had. real life experiences to, to hang his experience during the war on, which was incredible. And I love that because you feel like you’re guided and then you’re guiding the reader through those experiences too.
Jenny Wheeler: It does give you the feeling of how vulnerable remote communities a long way from the action could feel within the war and also the vulnerability of the young men that went off with no idea at all about what they were going to, feeling drawn by some invisible thread.
Did that touch you as you were working on it?
Amanda Geard: It did that sense that they were going off on this great adventure, and I touched on it briefly Grace, who’s the protagonist or one of the protagonists in the 1940s, her uncle was in the First World War, and, you can see the way that he reacts to this sense of adventure that young men have then. In 1940, 41, 42 it was very different in Tasmania because less men joined up because there were less places.
Digging for gold with Dad to exploration geologistIt was quite disorganized initially, and they went overseas much later. they were reading about it in the newspaper. There wasn’t so much the sense of imminent danger, but actually when you dig a little deeper, you can feel that people were really afraid.
For Tasmania, there were always rumors later in the war, after 1942 of sighting Japanese planes off the coast.
And lots of sightings of German submarines. And in fact, Bass Strait was mined during the war and shipping stopped for a time. Tasmania felt very isolated and people at home front also really wanted to do their bit
Grace, who is inspired by Banjo Patterson, our famous ballad writer, she starts to write ballads about the war, and I wanted to incorporate some of the things that she learned.
For example, in Launceston, they were doing bingo to raise money for a Spitfire in the UK. I made up this Spitfire bingo ballad and, so there were so many incredible little snippets.
There were blackouts in Launceston during all of the war. And there were a lot of fortifications made as well and bunkers dug. Things I had no idea about before.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.. It seems like you might be attracted to wild places because it is Tasmania, which is remote enough, but you set it on a remote part of the coast in Tasmania. And I gather your father was very familiar with that part of the coast. Tell us about that family connection.
Amanda Geard: Yes, my dad loved geology as I was growing up and he’s actually an agricultural scientist. So he worked in the poppy industry in Tasmania, which is a huge industry over there. But weekends where we’re not spent in the fields, we would go off into the hills with picks and shovels and go off panning.
We might go to the Northwest looking for sapphires or to the West coast, learning the tin mining history or looking for gold or copper, not commercially, obviously, just to learn the history of the rocks and, all of that prospecting history really underpins a lot of the modern settlement in Tasmania,
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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Discovering a tumbledown Kerry homestead
He loved all that pioneering history. We used to go camping and did a lot of hiking in Tassie, although I suppose at the time when I was a teenager, I was probably a bit grumpy and wanted to be off to parties rather than off in the bush, but it must have really rubbed off on me because I ended up studying geology and becoming an exploration geologist.
I really love the west coast of Tasmania and, that whole southwestern area of the state is World Heritage Area and you can really hike for a long time without seeing anyone down there and it’s just magic.
Jenny Wheeler: You live in a similar environment now in Ireland. Tell us about that.
Amanda Geard: Yeah, so we’re in the southwest of Ireland and it was a bit of an accident. My husband and I were in Norway, because we were geologists. We were living in all kinds of places. And we came here on holiday and rented a really cheap car. It was off season and we did the Ring of Kerry, which probably quite a few of your listeners might have done was this famous tourist route down here in Kerry.
We were driving along and we came over the hill and saw this fantastic old house, quite tumbled down and there was a sign on the gate that said if you really squinted, you could see that it was a faded for sale sign and you could just read the number.
I don’t know why, but one of us called it. Anyway, in the end, we viewed the place and we ended up staying and renovating it over many years and many tears.
That was the love of Kerry started and the love of old houses really grew by living here, but it is very wild. The sandstone plunges into the Atlantic and you can get lost in the fells behind us. And it’s a beautiful place.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. This is your second multiple time novel, as we’ve mentioned, and the first, The Midnight House, was a Richard and Judy selection. Now, for people outside of England, there’s quite a lot of our audience that is outside of England, explain what the significance of being a Richard and Judy choice is.
Richard and Judy – Big coup for a debut bookAmanda Geard: Best way to explain it is when my agent called and told me I had to sit down very suddenly because it’s a big coup in the UK. So Richard and Judy have had their book club running, I think, since the early 2000s and it was part of their morning television program.
Later on, I think about 2009, it became a collaboration with W. H. Smith. (a huge UK bookseller) it’s now exclusively with W. H. Smith and they pick six novels every two or three months. And there are a lot of fans of Richard and Judy. They’ll buy all of them and find new writers and read outside their normal genre.
It is really fantastic. There’s a whole special print run done with a Q and A at the back. Andi t’s a real coup, I think it’s probably the biggest book club, it’s the biggest hitting book club in the UK.
Jenny Wheeler: Now, that book spent five months at the top of the UK Kindle lists. Tell us about that story. It does have a similar ring to the one we were talking about, The Moon Gate – similarities and settings and so forth.
So tell us about The Midnight House.
Amanda Geard: Yes. The Midnight House – if your readers enjoy The Moon Gate, I think they will certainly enjoy The Midnight House. Again, I’ve taken three timelines and woven them together.
And there’s a series of mysteries hiding between them. And it centers on Ellie Fitzgerald, who is a disgraced journalist who returns from Dublin to County Kerry down here where I’m living.
And she learns about an aristocrat who went missing in 1939 or 40 at the start the war and is presumed drowned, but she discovers a letter that was written by this woman several days later.
And so she goes off on a journey to try and find this Charlotte, Lady Charlotte Rathmore.
And I have a section of the novel written in the 1950s, which links the present and the past, which is what I love to do, because I think I never like to look at a big incident in isolation.
And so I’ve got the three timelines running through and quite a lot of the setting is in Blitz London, which I really enjoyed researching. I’m not sure if enjoyed, but I found it fascinating researching Blitz London and writing that setting.
Amanda’s process requires Excel spread sheetJenny Wheeler: Great. Look, it sounds very intricate plotting, the same with The Moon Gate. How do you go about your writing process? Do you have a big timeline on the wall or how do you do it? Do you let it just fall into your lap as you go along? Tell us about the process.
Amanda Geard: Oh, I wish it could just fall into my lap. That would be amazing. I love hearing interviews from writers who are pantsers who write by the seat of their pants. I’m very envious. These ones anyway, these three, with three timelines, there’s a lot of planning and plotting and I use Excel.
Initially I come up with some ideas and I just stick some non fancy A4 paper together and scrawl ideas. And I generally take those out, do dot points in different colors for the timelines and then put them into Excel and on it goes until I’ve planned it.
There’s normally quite shortish chapters, but many of them, so there might be 80 – 50 to 80.
I’ll basically plan out the chapters in Excel and things can go awry along the way, mostly confidence wise. I think many writers, obviously, we all struggle with that. the fear of the blank page.
But on the whole, I stick broadly to the outline, I say that doesn’t always happen, but I try to stick broadly to the outline.
And that’s how it pulls together, but there’s always a lot of editing. My favorite bit is, you’ve done the first draft and then weaving in some of the items and some of the letters that, that people find in the present that link to the past where you feel like you’re tightening the plot.
And I love that feeling the weaving gets more and more intricate and you’re really making something really beautiful then.
Jenny Wheeler: But before you actually start writing, you do have a pretty definite outline there?
Amanda Geard: I do for example, from the third book I’m writing now, I have a 10, 000 or 13, 000 word outline. They’re quite big books. If it were an 80, 000 word book, that would be pretty significant outline. These books are 100 to 110 or 20, 000. but I like to have a really big outline.
I send the outline to my editor and she likes to see it in chronological order, so if it were The Moon Gate, she would see the 1940s through the seventies and then through the modern day. But I don’t really think like that. I think of it as you read it.
From ‘blow in’ to ‘adopted daughter’I have to pull it apart, make it chronological, and then I see a load of problems, of course, but I plan it, bouncing back and forth. As you read it I want every event to, to play forward into the other two timelines as well.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve lived all over the world, obviously in some very remote and exotic places. And you’ve now, at least for this time, settled in Ireland and you identify with your Irish situation. You said in a newspaper interview recently, being Irish is a feeling and you seem to have picked up on that feeling.
Tell us about that observation.
Amanda Geard: They say here that unless your grandparents are buried in the local graveyard, you’re a blow in.
I’ll always be a blow in and it’s the same in all small communities, the world over and I refer to that term quite a bit in The Midnight House because there’s a few blow ins, appear in that.
But aside from that, always being a blow in the community is really welcoming and I always say to people that I love when if I’m having a rough day at work or rough day writing or whatever, if I just give up, hop on the bike – well it’s normally raining, so get into the car and drive down to the local shops, maybe 5 kilometers and just go in and buy a packet of biscuits.
Somebody in there will make you laugh. then lift you up. They make you laugh or they’ll have some comment that you’ll remember and you’ll want to write down because it’s so Irish and Kerry and lovely.
It’s that feeling that really, makes you feel at home here. I think we’ve been really welcomed. We have a godson here. And I remember when we first moved here, we were sitting in the big old tumble down house that we were trying to renovate,
Sleeping in a tent in a windowless houseWe’d pulled out the windows, they were all rotten and we were having windows delivered and there were no windows.
We were sleeping in a tent in the house, in the rain and a tractor came along the road that we’d seen go up and down the road because they all have very small fields here that they go back and forth, between the animals.
But this time, he turned up the driveway and we raced down the steps. And he upped the bucket of the tractor and dropped a load of firewood and then drove off.
It was just a welcome present and we didn’t even know who he was. And later we became great friends and actually we became the god godparents for their son.
So yes, it was just moments like that where you just feel really welcome and it’s a really special community.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Look, turning away from talking about the individual books, a little wider look at your career. How did you transition from being a geologist to being a best selling writer?
Amanda Geard: I got two things there. I’m still a geologist and also I’m not too best selling, but one day we hope. I always say book six.
I was at the pub, where all great things happen and I had a wine or two and I saw it. This was in Ireland, of course. And I saw a flyer for writer’s week in Listowel, which is a big writing festival here in Ireland, but I hadn’t heard of it and it was on the next day.
We have to drive to go to the supermarket anyway, so I thought, look, I’ll hop in the car and go up there and see what this is all about.
I went up with my shopping bags and went to the library to a book launch and I was just fascinated. I sat in this book launch.
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