With the release of Journey to New Lands getting closer, I wanted to share a little more about the story behind the story, because this book began with something very personal to me.
When I was a child, my mum used to tell me about my ancestors. My family was very passionate about our Irish heritage – the closer relatives and the more distant. One day, she told me about an ancestor who had travelled to Australia during the Great Famine. Except there was one problem: there was no record of him arriving.
We couldn’t find any passenger record and there was no ship listing his name. As far as the historical record seemed concerned, he simply disappeared from Ireland and then, one day, appeared in Australia.
It became this fascinating little mystery in my family history, and I kept coming back to the same question: what would drive someone to become a stowaway to Australia during the famine?
Because that would not have been a small decision. Australia was on the other side of the world, the voyage took months, and conditions aboard immigrant ships could be brutal. There wasn’t even any guarantee that the life waiting at the other end would be any easier. To hide aboard a ship without a legitimate passage would mean risking discovery and severe punishment, alongside all the other issues aboard long voyages.
So what could make staying in Ireland feel even more dangerous than all of that?
That question became the seed of Journey to New Lands.
I began imagining a young Irishman who had reached a point where there was almost nothing left for him at home. Someone who had lost people he loved, who was starving, angry, grieving, and desperate enough to take an enormous risk simply for the possibility of surviving somewhere else.
And eventually, Patrick O’Sullivan began to take shape.
The story grew far beyond that original question, of course. Patrick is fictional, and his life is not intended to recreate my ancestor’s story. The truth is, I will probably never know exactly how or why my ancestor came to Australia. That gap in the historical record is precisely what fascinated me. Somewhere inside that silence was an entire human story and fiction gave me the freedom to ask what that story might have looked like.
When people hear that a novel is set during the Great Famine and follows Irish immigrants travelling to Australia, it is easy to assume the book is primarily about migration or history. Those things are certainly woven deeply into Journey to New Lands, but the heart of this story has always been much more personal.
At its core, this is a book about what happens after survival.
Patrick and Aisling both arrive in Australia carrying lives that have already been shaped by fear, hunger and loss. They have crossed an ocean hoping for something better, but neither of them arrives untouched by what came before.
Patrick has lost almost his entire family during the famine. By the time he reaches New South Wales, grief has become so deeply embedded in him that he no longer knows where remembrance ends and guilt begins. He works constantly, keeps people at a distance, and convinces himself that wanting anything more from life would somehow betray the people who never had the chance to reach it.
Aisling has survived something different. Her decision to leave Ireland is not only about famine or poverty. She is also running from a future that has been chosen for her by men who believe they have the right to decide what happens to her life. Boarding a ship to the other side of the world is terrifying, but for the first time it offers her something she has desperately wanted: the possibility of choosing for herself.
That idea of choice became one of the threads I loved most while writing this book. Aisling chooses to leave because she hopes for more. She chooses to keep her faith and be the kind of woman she wants to become.
And eventually, Patrick has to decide whether surviving means simply continuing to breathe, or whether he is willing to risk building a life again.
Their romance grows inside that journey. Patrick and Aisling are not people who fall into effortless love. Patrick continually retreats the moment he becomes too comfortable, while Aisling has very little patience for his habit of pretending he does not care. She sees kindness in him long before he is willing to admit it exists.
Aisling does not heal Patrick simply by loving him, and Patrick does not rescue Aisling from her past. Instead, they slowly create a relationship in which both of them are safe enough to begin healing themselves.
Patrick and Aisling never stop loving the country they came from. Their children will know its stories, its faith, its sorrow and its strength. But they will also grow up beneath an Australian sky, belonging to both the history their parents carried across the ocean and the future they built with their own hands.
Perhaps that is part of why this story means so much to me.
More than 170 years ago, someone in my own family left Ireland during one of the darkest periods in its history and somehow made his way to Australia. I don’t know which ship carried him or what the journey looked like. I don’t know exactly what pushed him to leave or what he felt when he first stepped onto Australian soil.
There are pieces of his story that have simply disappeared with time.
But I know that he came and he survived. And generations later, I am here because somewhere along the way he made the extraordinary decision to begin again.
Journey to New Lands is not his story, but in many ways, his mystery is where mine began.
Journey to New Lands releases November 5th 2026, and I cannot wait for you to finally meet Patrick and Aisling and travel with them from Ireland to the other side of the world.
Not long now.
Emilie Turner 