JESSICA DETTMANN 'I HAD TO WRITE SOMETHING TO JUSTIFY MY WANDERLUST!'

Taking a solo trip to London gave the Australian author plenty of inspiration for her new novel

- JESSICA DETTMANN

Give us your elevator pitch for Your Friend And Mine...

Margot and Tess were best friends in 2000, working in a pub in Sydney. Twenty years later, Margot runs a restaurant with her partner, and Tess is long dead. When Margot receives an email from Tess, written before her death, she is thrown into a trip to London to live the gap year they never managed while Tess was alive, but now in the company of another friend of Tess', Leo. Margot feared they would not have lived the lives they had hoped for, so she has left them a series of quests to carry out in her memory.

What led you to write this story – and was it just so you could escape Sydney and have an overseas research trip?!