Danielle has a tale to tell about cats
An award-winning Brisbane author is entertaining audiences young and old with her latest novel.
Danielle de Valera has had a chequered career.
She’s worked as a botanist, an editor, a cataloguer for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries Library and the John Oxley Library, and on the main floor of Arnott’s biscuit factory.
The National Seniors Australia New Farm Branch member is also an award-winning writer who began putting pen to paper when she was very young.
Although the initial draft of her first novel, now called Those Brisbane Romantics, was placed second in the in the Australia-wide Xavier Society Literary Award for an unpublished novel when Danielle was in her 20s, she abandoned writing for 25 years to raise her children, whom she raised alone.
She resumed writing in 1990 and her short stories appeared in such diverse magazines as Penthouse, Aurealis, Dotlit, and the Australian Women’s Weekly.
In 2016, she put them all together and they were published in a collection titled Dropping Out: A Tree Change Novel-in-Stories.
The book was short-listed for the Woollahra Digital Literary Award in 2017.
With Louise Forster, she won the Australia-New Zealand-wide Emma Darcy Award for Romance Manuscript of the Year 2000 with Found: One Lover.
That novel was shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2011, and for the University of Exeter’s Impress Prize in 2012.
Now in her 80s, Danielle has also been a freelance manuscript assessor and fiction editor since 1992.
Her latest novel, Counterculture Blues: A Fable, was published in September 2024.
What’s it about? Here’s the synopsis on Amazon:
“Claude is a big-hearted marmalade cat, who moved to the country to escape city life. He works as a barcat in Tuckaburra, a small country town once a centre of the counterculture movement in Australia.
“Here, he lives happily with partner Mao, Mao’s two catlings Wintergreen and Rupert, and Mao’s mother Sylvia, who owns the cottage they all live in.
“All is rosy until …
“Sylvia mortgages the cottage to start a herbalism business to provide for Wintergreen and Rupert’s higher education. Then the hotel Claude works in burns down.
“Claude has a series of misadventures in part-time jobs as he tries to save the family home. Through it all, he never loses his belief in his personal fable: Things always work out in the end.
“The cats are forced to start selling the furniture to meet the mortgage repayments. (A rich koala from Possum Shoot buys the bookcase.) When all seems lost, a good deed Mao once insisted the family do pays off in an unexpected way.”
Danielle says it’s a feel-good book that entails trials and tribulations and eventual triumph.
“It’s interesting,” she says. “Although I wrote the novel for adults, it’s turned out to be one of those rare books that’s suitable for all ages.”
Counterculture Blues is available for purchase online here or here.
For your chance to win a signed copy, click here.
