With Journey to New Lands getting closer to release, I thought I would share five things to know before you step aboard with Patrick and Aisling.
This is a historical romance, but it’s also a story shaped by grief, faith, survival, and the complicated question of what it means to begin again when so much of your life has already been lost.
So, before you read, here are five things worth knowing.
1. This is a love story… a very slow one
Patrick and Aisling do not meet and immediately tumble into a sweeping romance.
Their relationship grows slowly, beginning aboard the ship carrying them from Ireland to Australia and developing through friendship, trust and dozens of small acts of care.
Patrick is guarded, grieving, and extremely committed to the belief that keeping his distance from everyone is a perfectly sensible way to live. Aisling is considerably less convinced.
Their romance is built in conversations beneath the stars, walks home from Mass, quiet moments beside sickbeds, shared memories of Ireland and the gradual realisation that the other person has become far more important than either intended.
If you love romances where the smallest touch can mean more than a grand declaration, there is plenty of that here. And yes, there is yearning.
Lots of yearning.
2. The Great Famine is not simply a backdrop
Journey to New Lands begins in 1847, during one of the most devastating periods in Irish history.
Patrick and Aisling are fictional characters, but the world surrounding them is shaped by very real suffering. Hunger, disease, poverty, emigration, and death have touched both of their lives before they ever step aboard the ship for Australia.
For Patrick particularly, the famine has changed everything. He has lost everything and carries enormous guilt about being the one who survived. He arrives in Australia physically alive, but emotionally he’s still standing among everything he left behind.
I wanted the historical setting to matter to the characters rather than simply decorate the story. Their decisions, fears, faith, and relationships have all been shaped by what they endured in Ireland. That also means this book deals with some difficult subjects, including famine, illness, death, grief, abusive family relationships and discrimination against Irish immigrants.
There is darkness in this story. But ultimately, it’s a story about hope.
3. Faith is an important part of Patrick and Aisling’s lives
Religion is not simply part of the historical scenery in Journey to New Lands. Faith is woven into the emotional journeys of the characters.
Aisling is deeply Catholic. Her faith has been a source of safety and strength through some of the worst moments of her life. When she enters a Catholic chapel in Australia and hears familiar prayers and Irish voices, she realises that although she has crossed to the other side of the world, not everything familiar has been left behind.
Patrick’s relationship with God is much more complicated.
He has lost too much to accept easy answers. He is angry, doubtful and deeply wounded, and part of his story is wrestling with what faith looks like after suffering. I didn’t want that struggle to disappear with one conversation or one prayer. Patrick’s journey back toward faith is gradual because grief is gradual.
His story asks whether someone can be angry with God and still slowly find their way back to Him.
4. There is a touch of the supernatural
From the beginning of the book, Patrick is haunted by his younger sister, Maggie.
Sometimes she feels almost like a memory made visible. Sometimes she feels like something more.
Patrick carries tremendous guilt surrounding her death, and her presence follows him from Ireland, across the ocean and into his new life in Australia. Maggie becomes inseparable from the way Patrick understands his grief and she’s a constant reminder of the family he believes he failed.
So while Journey to New Lands is historical fiction rather than fantasy, there is a quiet supernatural thread running through the story. It is less about ghosts being frightening and much more about the things grief refuses to let us leave behind.
5. This is a story about home
Patrick and Aisling leave Ireland because they need the possibility of something better, but neither of them wants to erase where they came from.
They remain Irish.
They carry their accents, traditions, memories, and grief with them. They encounter people in the colony who look down on Irish immigrants, but the story never treats leaving Ireland as leaving their identity behind.
Instead, Journey to New Lands asks whether a person can belong to two places at once.
Can you mourn one home while learning to love another and can you carry the people you lost without allowing their deaths to prevent you from living? Can a place that begins as strange and frightening eventually become the soil in which you build an entirely new life?
There can still be love after grief, faith after doubt, and family after loss. Sometimes home is the life you build when you finally allow yourself to believe there might be a future.
Journey to New Lands releases November 5th 2026.
