The World Beneath Her Feet by Holly Ringland

The World Beneath Her Feet is the third novel from Holly Ringland, the Australian author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (made into the Prime Video series) and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.

Maggie Byrd is in her late thirties, living a settled London life: work with fossils and gems at the Natural History Museum, a home shared with her best friend Harriet and her partner Joe. What she has kept buried is Australia, and the guilt-ridden girl who left it in her early twenties swearing never to come back. Then she inherits her uncle's rewilded land in a valley of southeast Queensland, near a town known for its opalised fossils, a lake said to be cursed and a tea-tree swamp that comes and goes, and the life she has built starts to come apart.

It is a novel about the places that make us, about first love and old betrayals, and about what it takes to come home. Australian storytelling for readers of Ringland's own Alice Hart, and of Charlotte McConaghy.