Violet Town

It’s 1939, and the Second World War has just begun.

Catherine Hawkins, longstanding resident of Hickory’s Orphanage, is entering her last year on scholarship at Dashwood Boarding School at Violet Town, in England’s countryside.

With unyielding ambition and cleverness, Cate aspires for future placement at Oxford University. However, with the arrival of new student Joseph Hume, a handsome American with an immediate attraction to her, her aspirations quickly fall by the wayside (along with her affinity for the school rules which prohibit relationships between students).

Violet Town is a captivating story of forbidden love and loss in the time of war.

Bryony McGuinness resides in Melbourne’s South-Eastern suburbs with her fiancé, David and furball-son, Archer. The second eldest of six, she took to writing from a very young age, and it was in Year 8, when she was daydreaming in the classroom, that the early stages of Violet Town were born, paving the way for what would become an ever-evolving project spanning two decades.

In her spare time, Bryony enjoys reading and travel, in 2025 having combined her passions to explore the sites and hometowns of Dickens, Austin, Carroll, Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters. Having lived abroad in her mid-twenties, and travelled the world, she has drawn from ample inspiration and life experience to arrive at her debut novel, Violet Town.

ISBN 9781764132183
1 September 2026 Release
Distributed by NewSouth Books