flowers, flour & fiction

Maya Linnell’s gaze is as clear as the view to the ocean from the studio where she writes from home at Narrawong on Victoria’s far south-western coast. “With the vision of hindsight, perhaps I should have invented 10 sisters in the McIntyre family,” she says. “But I only made four and now their stories are told.”

For the past five years, Maya has lived and breathed her fictional family’s every move, from her debut novel, , to her latest offering on their lives, . The series, which also includes and , is loosely set in Victoria’s Western Disrict, where Maya’s husband, Jason, grew up. Maya also grew up not that far away, just over the South Australian border at Tantanoola on the Limestone Coast. It’s where she did her journalism cadetship on the and where she met Jason, an aircraft engineer. They eloped to Tasmania and came home to roost at Narrawong, where they built, quite literally, brick by hand-made brick, their cathedral-style home on eight acres (3.2 hectares) of farmland, which they share wi th