FORMER Perth Hills resident Deborah Pike has recently launched her debut novel The Players with half the book set in the Walliston and Bickley Valley areas.
“Many sections of the book were drafted at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Greenmount,” Ms Pike said.
The Players is a work of literary fiction, described as ‘a sweeping epic of friendship where all the world’s a stage.’
In short, it’s about a group of young amateur actors and their lives across 10 years and spanning the globe (half of it set in Perth and the hills, and the other half in Berlin, Dili, London, Paris, Berlin).
It is told from multiple perspectives with some meta-themes in it around the roles they perform in The Marriage of Figaro.
The first part of the novel is a somewhat nostalgic take on 1990s Western Australia.
To that end, The Players is a story about Western Australia and Western Australians.
“This includes first and second-generation immigrants and refugees, travellers as well as descendants from landed gentry.
“While the rehearsal scenes take place in the Perth Hills, around the area of the Bickley Valley, the John Forrest National Park and Kalamunda, there are other scenes set in Crawley on the UWA campus, Cottesloe, Kings Park, Northbridge, Fremantle, Kardinya, Midland, Guildford, North Perth, central Perth, as well as Geraldton and the south coast of WA, in a fictional town called Starfish Bay.”
Place is very much part of the novel’s action and shapes the characters’ identities.
With so many Australian novels set in the east, this narrative is a refreshing depiction of Western Australian stories and locales.
Ms Pike said her creative side had been largely influenced by her mother Jane Pike, who was a much-loved member of the hills community, a long-time member of the Kalamunda Bridge Club, and a director, choreographer and producer of an opera in Stirk Park during Covid.
The Perth launch will be held at Manning Library on May 17 www.events.humanitix.com and books are available for $34.99 at www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/the-players
