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Hey, everybody—thrilling news! Just a week ago, Australia got its first woman Prime Minister.  YES! (Air punch.)  Her name's Julia and she's smart and funny and her politics are great, and she's a redhead and she's not married but she lives with a guy called Tim who thinks she's terrific. I reckon Tim should be known as the First Bloke—what do you think?

And, in only slightly less world-shattering news, tomorrow my second novel, Trust, will be released here in the United States.  YES! (again).  You're excited for me, right?  Good, because I'm terrified. You see, in Australia, I got great reviews in every major newspaper in the country—here, check them out on my website—and you can tell just from the quotes that I'm not fibbing.  I also talked myself hoarse on radio interviews and at the Sydney Writers Festival. 

Not to mention the launch: in Australia, you see, we like to celebrate the birth of a book with a party, and the bigger the better. Friends, speeches, music, wine, dancing girls ... okay, maybe not so much the dancing girls.  But you can tell from the photo of me at the launch of Trust in Melbourne a couple of months ago that I was one happy author.

But here in the US, I am hardly even a minnow in this immense sea of books. The likelihood of Trust sinking beneath the waves without leaving an oil slick seems high. Sickeningly high. I know, I know: I felt the same horrible fear last time, when my first novel Without a Backward Glance was published here—and it didn't happen then, did it? No: that first novel got some terrific reviews and sold really well, and I had lots of emails from American readers who loved it ... But will I be that lucky again?  Surely it would be unlucky to dare imagine that I could be!