Top Ten Tuesday: Authors attending the Rachael Johns Reader Retreat 2025

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Authors (or books by authors) Who Live In My State/Country (submitted by Jennifer @ Funk-N-Fiction)

I love it when I am able to focus on Australian authors, and I think I could write a post just on authors who live in Melbourne but I am going to narrow it down a little bit. In a couple of weeks I am heading over to Perth for the weekend to see some family and to attend the 3rd Rachael Johns Reader Retreat. There will be about 100 readers and 20 featured authors attending and I am looking forward to it! 

Today, I am sharing ten authors who are attending the retreat! A lot of these authors live in Perth so it is good for them not to have to travel to the retreat this year. I have met some of the other authors at previous retreats so I am going to start with the ones I have not yet met.

I posted about the previous retreats. This is the post for 2024 and this is the one for 2023.

Some of these might be a bit hard to track down for anyone living outside Australia, but I hope that this list is still of interest

Barbara Hannay - I have read Barbara Hannay before when she was part of the quartet of writers who wrote the Outback Brides of Wirralong (reviewed here) and the Outback Babies series. She has quite an extensive backlist!

Kylie Kaden - I am not familiar with this author's books so it will be interesting to learn more about her!

Alexandra Almond - A debut author who comes from Melbourne!

Nadia Mahjouri - I have heard such good things about this author's debut novel.

Deb Jordan - The third of the debut authors who will be attending the retreat

Nicole Flockton - I am not really that familiar with this author although she has written a lot and is a USA Today best selling author! I had to pick this title as soon as I saw it although this particular book doesn't come out until June!

Christine Wells - I have been meaning to read Christine Wells for the longest time as I should love her books! I did start this one once but didn't get very far before I got distracted!

Sara Foster - Technically I did meet Sara Foster years ago, but it was a very, very long time ago!

Natasha Lester - I actually did meet Natasha Lester a couple of weeks ago, but her book The Madamoiselle Alliance is one of the book club books we will be discussing over the weekend.

Stella Quinn - This is the other book club book that we will be discussing over the weekend. Stella was at the inaugural retreat a couple of years ago.

There are lots of other authors going that I have met before! I will most likely post something about the retreat once I get back!

This Week...

I'm reading....

After a few weeks of not reading much at all I did manage to finish a couple of books this week. I read the first two book in the Outback Babies series, His Best Friend's Baby by Barbara Hannay and A Mother for Ella by Trish Morey.  These books are set in the fictional town of Wirralong and are part of 4 book multi author series. I have read two other similar series set in the past and find them really comfortable reads. I expect that I will read the other two books at some point soon.

Part of the reason for needing comfort reads over the last week is that we finally caught COVID, so it has been a bit of a rough week. When you combine it with end of financial year and selling a house, there's a lot going on. 

This week I am also reading The Sweetheart Locket by Jen Gilroy for a blog tour later in the week. This is a dual timeline novel set in London in WWII. What makes this one different for me is that one of the characters is Canadian. So far I am enjoying it.

I'm watching....

Feeling pretty blargh lends itself to lots of viewing, and somewhat unusually we watched a number of movies.

One of the movies we watched was Fire Island. This is a modern remake of Pride and Prejudice, with a cast of Asian gay characters off to Fire Island for their annual party weekend.

I then went on a bit of a foodie movie binge, starting with Toscana, which I talked about in this week's Weekend Cooking post!

I then followed that up with a documentary movie called Blind Ambition which followed the fortunes of the Zimbabwean wine tasting team. Really interesting! I plan to post about it at some point...maybe.

And finally, Master Cheng which is a movie about a Chinese cook who finds himself in a tiny town in Finland!

I do still have a couple more foodie movies that I would like to watch on my list too!

We also finished watching Obi-Wan Kanobe and started watching season 3 of Umbrella Academy.

Life

See aforementioned statement about COVID! I am feeling much better today though. Even managed to work 12 hours today! Of coure, tomorrow I might be completely wiped. We'll see.

Posts from the last week

Weekend Cooking: Toscana

I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date