Anna Morgan is the author of Before the Beginning, a new young adult novel that tells the story of four friends and the mysterious stranger they encounter during Schoolies week.
Anna was born in Sydney, but spent most of her childhood surrounded by mountains in Nepal and Tibet while her parents were part of an international community of health professionals. Navigating this cross-cultural life made her a curious observer of people, although most of her time was spent reading Enid Blyton and dreaming of going to boarding school. This did not cushion the shock of shifting from home-school in Tibet to an all-girls high school in Melbourne when her family returned to Australia. Anna completed a MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University in 2015, and now lives in Melbourne with her husband. She works as a bookseller.
Today, Anna Morgan is on the blog to tell us about how it feels to be releasing a novel about change in a changing world. Read on …
When I decided to write a novel about transition and change, I had no idea that it would be published in the year of the biggest upheaval of my lifetime. I was drawn to write Before The Beginning because I wanted to explore that feeling as a teenager of being on the brink of your adult life. Schoolies week is the perfect microcosm of this feeling: exams are finished, but you haven’t yet got your results. School is over, but you don’t necessarily know what you’re doing next. You’re on a week away from your family with your friends, in an intense environment where all kinds of tensions can bubble to the surface. It’s after the end and before the beginning – when everything is about to change.
But none of my four characters want that change to come – for different reasons, all of them want to stay in the in-between time a little longer. So instead of going on their planned schoolies week holiday, they are drawn to camp on an uninhabited island with a stranger they meet on their first night, to try and forget what might happen after the week ends.
As a resident of Melbourne, over the past weeks in lockdown nature has become more important to me, and I found myself noticing the plants and birds on my daily walks. The four teenagers in Before The Beginning also connect with the island and through encounters with rosellas, dolphins, summer storms, and caves thick with the smell of seaweed they begin to notice new things about themselves, too.
While none of them are facing a global pandemic, my four characters are all facing sudden upheval, as the lives they had planned for after school begin to fall apart. Grace has based her whole identity around her religious faith – but now she’s having doubts, and fears losing her community and her plans to work at her church next year. Noah has worked so hard to achieve a top ATAR, but has a secret about his final exam. Casper is creatively stuck and needs to come up with a piece for his portfolio to get into his dream art course, and Elsie doesn’t know what she wants to do and is terrified everyone else is going to leave her behind. So how do you adjust to big changes when nothing is working out the way you thought?
I know schoolies for this year’s school leavers will be very different, and I am sure this time of in-between will be even more full of anxiety than ever. I gave my characters big challenges in this novel, and put them on an uninhabited island for a week to see how they would respond. My hope for the young people of 2020 is the same for my characters – maybe they will see, like Grace, that shifting from black and white thinking to curiosity can lead to joyful new places; or like Casper find sometimes treating the people around you with empathy is more important than personal achievement. Perhaps they will discover like Noah that even when it seems they have failed they have the resilience to keep going, and that they will find out like Elsie how courageous they can be in the face of a crisis.
There can be so much pressure on young people at this stage of their lives – but it is just as important to know that you’ll still be okay, even if nothing goes as you’ve planned.
—Before the Beginning by Anna Morgan (Hachette Books Australia) is out now.
This book is part of our 2020 Christmas Gift Guide! You could win 1 Million Qantas Points when you order any product featured in our Christmas Gift Guide between 2 November and 14 December, 2020.*
Before the Beginning
Schoolies week: that strange in-between time when teenagers move from school into the adult world. It's a week when anything is possible, and everything can change.
Grace is questioning everything she thought about herself, and has opted not to join her clique of judgemental friends for schoolies, instead tagging along with her brother Casper and his friends. Casper, an artist, is trying to create the perfect artwork for his uni application folio. Overachieving, anxiety-ridden Noah is reeling from a catastrophe that might have ruined his ATAR result. And Elsie is just trying to figure out...
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