A Song in the Daylight

A Song in the Daylight

If anyone asked Larissa's husband, children or friends if she was happy, they would say yes. She has a happy marriage, a dream house, and everything she ever wanted at her fingertips. Yet a chance encounter with a young man new to town hits her like a lightning bolt. Irresistible passion drives her to contemplate the unthinkable. But if she dares to make the impossible leap, what will her life be then?

Passionate and brilliant, Paullina Simons writes with a raw power that has won her a fanatically loyal fan base. Combining humour, heartache and suspense with discernable and human characters Paullina's books have resonated with readers the world over.

Paullina on A Song in the Daylight:
'[It is the story of] Larissa Stark, a wife, a mother, a theater director, a woman beautiful and successful in every way, except for the slight open spaces in the corners of her soul, the spaces into which she allows a passion for another man to flow in, and this is the love affair that changes her life and the life of everybody around her. It's about love and its consequences, about children and their consequences, about life and its consequences.'

Paullina Simons has sold over a million copies of her books worldwide making her one of the best loved novelists of her generation. Destined to be her best book yet, A Song in the Daylight is an epic Anna Karenina for the twenty-first century.

After graduating from university and after various jobs Paullina wrote her first novel Tully. Through word of mouth readers all over the world welcomed Tully and Paullina Simons into their lives. She is the author of ten books, including the internationally bestselling The Bronze Horseman and Road to Paradise, which sold over 100,000 copies.

A Song in the Daylight
Harpers Collins Australia
Author: Paullina Simons
ISBN: 9780007241552
Price: $32.99

Interview with Paullina Simons

How does it feel knowing that most girls have read your books?

Paullina Simons: Stupendous. Though what are their mothers thinking? Don't they know what their kids are reading?


Where did the idea for A Song in the Daylight come from?

Paullina Simons: I loved the idea of a disenchanted woman living an enchanted life. Enchanted women living enchanted lives is not a story, it's an ending. Enchanted women living disenchanted lives is a sermon. Disenchanted women living disenchanted lives is a college course. But a disenchanted woman living an enchanted life is true tragedy and great fiction.

Tell us why you chose to set the book partly in the Australian outback?

Paullina Simons: The desert is where you go when you are lost and want to be found. The desert at the end of the world, in the middle of another world, in a life alien to the life you had been living, and foreign to the very idea of yourself, is the perfect place for a wandering soul, blinded, yet trying to see.


This story is based on something that happens all the time, the 'girl falling from bad guy', how did you approach the topic in a real way, have you experienced this before?

Paullina Simons: I write about the consequences of it. Normally we're not interested in real consequences. In fiction we enjoy being contrived out of our consequences. Conveniently plotted out of the most excruciating of situations. In ASITD, I wanted to show what happens when the girl falls in love with the "bad guy" (so to speak) but the "bad guy" also falls in love with her. In my head, I have experienced the impossibility of the consequences of an illicit love such as the one I describe in the novel. Or even the one I wrote about in the Bronze Horseman.


Do you feel love always has consequences?

Paullina Simons: Yes, I do. Yes, it does.


What do you look forward to most when coming to Australia?

Paullina Simons: Meeting my passionate devoted readers.


Are you working on a new novel now?

Paullina Simons: Yes, an impossible love story set during the famine of the Ukraine and the Great Depression of the 1930s.