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A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists by Jane Rawson: 9 Feb, 2017

It's 1997 in San Francisco. Simon and Sarah are on a quest to stand in every 25-foot square of the United States at least once. Decades later, in Australian, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River. She’s sick of being broke and alone. Caddy’s future changes when her friend, Ray, finds some well-worn maps—including one of San Francisco. Their lives connect with those of Simon and Sarah in ways that are both unexpected and profound.

A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists was the winner of the Most Underrated Book of 2014.

Jane Rawson will join us for a Q&A on Thursday, 9 February between 8 and 9pm. Please leave any questions you have below. (And discuss the book at your leisure!)

Want to buy A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists? Receive 10% off when purchasing it from Readings at State Library Victoria. To receive the discount online, enter the promo code BOOKCLUB in the promo code box during online checkout. To receive the discount at our State Library bookshop, simply mention the Thursday night book club at the counter.

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Hi Jane! You've written and published three books in three years, how did you do it??

I cheated! I wrote the first draft of 'A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists' in 2007 and 2008, and I wrote the first draft of 'Formaldehyde' in 2000. 'The Handbook' was written from scratch, but I had a co-author, so I only had to write half a book. And I started writing 'From the wreck' in 2009. In reality, I've written three and a half books (or three, if a novella only counts as half a book) in 17 years. By the time 'A wrong turn...' was published in 2013, I already had a nice backlog of partly or nearly finished manuscripts that I could polish up and submit to publishers over the next four years. Now I'm out of manuscripts and I have to start my next book from the very beginning, so it might be a while between books...
I guess the moral is that maybe it's not so bad if it takes a while for your first book to get published, as long as you keep writing while you're waiting through that interminable process of submitting and being rejected over and over and over.

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