Amy's busy GP and the abrupt obstetrician she is referred to do nothing to allay her fears and with Dylan, a serving member of the ADF, often absent and her only real friend, Hannah, avoiding her, Amy goes in search of support and validation.Īmy is a likeable protagonist, a little naive and self absorbed but also idealistic, funny and generally well intentioned. Twenty four year old Amy Silva is stunned to discover she is pregnant and, despite the support of her long term loving partner Dylan, it's a struggle for her to accept the idea of impending birth and motherhood. Her other published works include Peace, Love and Khaki Socks, Like I Can Love, and The Three of Us.Peace, Love and Khaki Socks is an engaging debut novel from Australian author Kim Lock. Ms Lock moved “back home” to Mount Gambier at the end of last year to be closer to family. The Other Side of Beautiful is published by Harper Collins and is available for sale online, at most major department stores, as well as local bookstores, such as The Raven’s Parlour at Tanunda.

“So when I wrote this character, I drew on a lot of my own physical sensations and how it manifested to me, the thought patterns and all of the what-ifs.” “That went for a year or two, not quite to the extent my character experienced but it’s something that had never been in my life before and was a real surprise for me. “Anxiety is something that came up for me five or six years ago, around the time of my second novel.to the point it did become quite hard for me to leave the house,” she said. Ms Lock said she was able to draw on her own experience with anxiety when writing her latest novel. “I had a reviewer the other day say the book gave them hope, which I felt was amazing.” “The main character suffers from anxiety, she hasn’t left her house and she has panic attacks, and I didn’t realise how much anxiety is the part of the novel people have connected with, until they’ve come back and told me,” Ms Lock said. When tragedy strikes and her house burns down, she finds herself reluctantly heading off on a road trip from Adelaide to Darwin. In The Other Side of Beautiful, character Mercy Blain is an agoraphobic women who has not left her house in two years.

“It came on the back of a rejection.so I threw all caution to the wind with this book and thought I’m just going to write something that makes me happy, makes me laugh.” A first draft usually take some 12 months this took me three, the difference being for this one being I put everything else off. “This was the quickest first draft I’ve ever written.

Peace, Love and Khaki Socks by Kim Lock