When Petronella McGovern celebrated, at a hotel in Manly, the publication of her latest book, she drank lime and soda, happily marking a year of giving up alcohol.
"Drinking's always been a part of my life," she says.
"I could not have imagined giving up for a year. I could not imagine. But I think once you stop, it feels so much better."
Her latest page-turner, The Last Trace, pulls together threads of a story that touches on issues from climate grief to DNA testing; families and siblings' birth order to the morals and mores of 1968 America - while also setting the story in the high country of the Snowy Mountains.
It sounds a lot, but in true McGovern style, she keeps the reader on edge, wanting to see every twisting turn eventually resolved.
McGovern seems to have really captured the zeitgeist by featuring main character Lachy, an accomplished engineer working on water security in the Third World, who also happens to suffer alcoholic blackouts and fears he's committed a crime that he can't remember.
There are some critical gaps in his memory. How is he connected to a missing woman, a hit-and-run, and a request for DNA?
It's that fear of what Lachy may or may not have done that threads throughout the book. And with it comes ruminations about memory and how it shifts with different perspectives or age. A point emphasised by the fact Lachy's mother is suffering from dementia.
A former Canberran, McGovern was nowhere near alcoholic blackouts, but she's among an apparent army of women in their 50s who seem to be giving up alcohol in favour of some much-needed clarity.
"I'd sort of been giving up drinking on and off, more for health reasons. I was doing this research about alcoholic blackouts and how terrible it is for your brain and I thought, 'I'll just give up until I have this knee operation' and then I had the knee operation and I thought, 'I'm just going to keep going, I'll keep going'," she says.
"So I'm up to a year and I think it's really interesting not drinking. You see the Aussie drinking environment at its best.
"But the alcoholic blackouts are fascinating. It's not like you're unconscious, you're still doing everything, you just don't remember because your memories don't lay down in the brain."
For her, giving up alcohol was about reaching an age where it just wasn't fun - "red wine and peri-menopause don't work at all".
"I feel as a writer and as a writer of twisty, complicated stories, I need my brain in full form," she says, laughing.
And The Last Trace is definitely a "twisty" story.
Engineer Lachy has retreated to the family bolthole in The Snowies, his teenage son Kai sent to stay with him from Sydney where he lives with his mother.
Lachy's older sister Sheridan, who seems to have taken on most of the family responsibilities, arrives with her family to the cabin in the mountains to spend Easter with him and Kai. Something devastating happens and sets off a story that goes back and forth from the past to the present and shows how the actions of previous generations are still reverberating in the family.
"I think it's mainly about family, family dynamics and the connections between past and present. And really siblings - how siblings relate to each other," McGovern, who dedicated the book to her four siblings, says.
"I found it interesting to think about - 'Can you ever get out of those sibling roles?' It's really hard to change them, especially when you all get back together.
"And as I said in the book, Lachy is completely competent when he's overseas but when he gets back home, he's the younger brother who Sheridan has to look after."
You can almost feel the crisp air and smell the curling smoke of a wood fire as McGovern evokes The Snowies in The Last Trace. Jindabyne and Cooma and Dalgety are all mentioned but the town where Lachy and Kai are living - Warabina - is fictional.
"When we lived in Canberra, we always loved going up to Cooma and the Snowy Mountains. We'd go skiing, but also go walking up Kosciusko in summer and I love that area and it's so inspiring, generally, let alone for a creative person," McGovern says.
"And I loved the idea of setting a story there. I wanted somewhere that Lachy could hide out from the rest of the world. It was quite remote. And I wanted a family cabin that was a place of memories and a lot of family gatherings, so if something goes wrong, it's extra significant that it's happening in this place which has so many family memories."
McGovern, 55, who used to work for IDP Education in Deakin, set her smash debut novel, Six Minutes, in Canberra. Her subsequent books, The Good Teacher and The Liars, were also as much about the place as the story. She now lives in Sydney with husband Jamie and their children, now aged 19 and 21.
McGovern will return to Canberra on Tuesday for a booked-out event at the Kingston library where she will discuss The Last Trace with Canberra author Emma Grey.
She's not quite at the stage of using a whiteboard to connect all the dots in her books, but instead writes a "really fast" first draft and then edits the story over and over.
"And when you do work out a strand, especially in the editing process, it's so exciting. 'That works - fantastic!'," she says.
In The Last Trace, McGovern has also woven in concerns about the environment. Water is a constant theme. Lachy's grandfather worked on the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme. Now Lachy's becoming depressed about the future of the world as he faces famine and drought working as a water engineer on aid projects overseas.
When McGovern started writing The Last Trace, "the Horn of Africa was suffering its worst drought in recorded history while on the east coast of Australia, we were experiencing torrential rain".
"After the bushfires and the pandemic and the floods, I think I was feeling quite depressed about the state of the world and 'How do we get to this next stage where we can address climate change?' and so I kind of poured my depression into Lachy," she says.
But that's not where the story ends.
"I like hope in the end. I always want hope," McGovern says.
- The Last Trace is published by Allen and Unwin.
