Violet Town

It’s 1939, and the Second World War has just begun.

Catherine Hawkins, an orphan and scholarship student with dreams of Oxford University, is entering her final year at Dashwood Boarding School in the English countryside.

Intelligent, ambitious and determined to shape a future beyond the limitations of her upbringing, Cate has little time for distraction. But when charismatic American student Joseph Hume arrives at the school, Cate finds herself pulled between the life she has carefully planned and a love that threatens to upend everything.

Set against the uncertainty of wartime England, Violet Town is a sweeping historical debut exploring ambition, identity, class, first love and loss.

Bryony McGuinness resides in Melbourne’s South-Eastern suburbs with her fiancé, David and furball-son, Archer. The second eldest of six, she took to writing from a very young age, and it was in Year 8, when she was daydreaming in the classroom, that the early stages of Violet Town were born, paving the way for what would become an ever-evolving project spanning two decades.

In her spare time, Bryony enjoys reading and travel, in 2025 having combined her passions to explore the sites and hometowns of Dickens, Austin, Carroll, Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters. Having lived abroad in her mid-twenties, and travelled the world, she has drawn from ample inspiration and life experience to arrive at her debut novel, Violet Town.

ISBN 9781764132183
15 September 2026 Release
Distributed by NewSouth Books