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Sue Woolfe returns with a novel of trauma and art

Popcorn Press

Key Facts:

• Australian author Sue Woolfe's new novel follows a famous composer who reveals her past to her mother's ghost while avoiding a persistent biographer
• The story explores the relationship between a daughter and her mother, who suffered from mysterious rages linked to her traumatic experiences in an Australian orphanage
• Based on a true story, the novel chronicles how the protagonist channels her childhood experiences into creating joyful music
• The narrative highlights the significant changes in women's lives between the 1950s and the following generation, from domestic constraints to personal freedom
• The novel is structured like a symphony and examines family silence, intergenerational trauma, and the transformative power of creative expression

Acclaimed Australian author Sue Woolfe returns after eight years with a luminous new novel, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves, a deeply moving exploration of mothers and daughters, buried trauma, and the mysterious ways art emerges from lived experience.

In this novel an Australian composer, loved for the joy of her music, at the height of her international fame is besieged by a would-be biographer who demands to know, as the world does, ­what’s behind her music, and how does she channel her life into her creativity?

She always evades him, but she tells the ghost of her mother what she wishes she’d admitted to in life.

This story, based on a true story, is a heart-racing portrayal of the journey towards creativity of an intuitive, devoted child who comes to suspect her mother’s strange rages are not what they seem but the result of a terrifying past - but what? - and can she save her mother from imminent catastrophe? Her discovery of the truth, that her mother came from one of Australia’s abusive orphanages, sharpens her resolve to find for herself the voice that might have once been her mother’s.

This story of Frances and her creation of joyful music is backgrounded by the seldom recognised vast revolution of women’s lives in the 20^th century - from a mother in the 1950s chained not only to terrible memories but drudgery - to, light years away but only in the next generation, a daughter who is free to fulfil the childhood dream that she had in an Sydney suburban back yard. 

Structured with the emotional resonance of a symphony, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is both intimate and expansive: a novel about what families cannot say, and the cost of that silence across generations. It also offers a rare and compelling insight into the creative process, tracing how music can arise from the depths of experience and transform pain into meaning.

The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves confirms Woolfe’s reputation for startling ideas, emotional depth and profound psychological insight.

ENDS

About us:

About Sue Woolfe
Sue Woolfe is one of Australia’s most distinguished literary voices, internationally published and widely awarded. Her novel Leaning Towards Infinity won the Christina Stead Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (regional) and became a long-running bestseller. Alongside her fiction, Woolfe has written influential works on creativity and the brain which explore the relationship between artistic practice and human experience.

About Popcorn Press
Popcorn Press is the Fiction imprint of Fair Play Publishing, which was established in 2016 by Bonita Mersiades, who is also the founder of the Manly Writers’ Festival. As well as Popcorn Press, Fair Play Books is dedicated to sports non-fiction, and Pepper Press publishes books about life.

Contact details:

For review copies, interviews, or further information, please contact:
Amy Mack, [email protected] or 02 7229 4889