Behind the cover: Thursdays at Orange Blossom House (2021)

How a character's favourite flower appeared in the title and on the cover

Dear Sunshiners,

If the title of my 2019 novel The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle took a while to emerge, it seemed quick in comparison to the title for Thursdays at Orange Blossom House, published in 2021 at a time when several states and one territory were in the hardest of lockdowns.

I’d agreed with my publisher to write a book with a yoga class at its centre, and I wanted to set it in and around Cairns in Far North Queensland, thinking of the tropical environment and the cane fields and how I could weave those into a story. The first chapter of the novel would be inspired by the opening lines of the Brad Butcher song ‘Well Dressed Man’: ‘There’s that sweet memory again/Burning rows of sugar cane/Under a sunset you just don’t see any more’.

As I started writing during the national lockdown in 2020 I made plans to visit Cairns as soon as the border between Queensland and New South Wales opened. It fluttered open in the middle of the year, and I started looking at flights, then it shut again. It would not reopen for any length of time until well past the manuscript’s due date, so I was not able to visit. Instead I relied on research and my memories of time spent in Port Douglas and Cairns several years before.

While I was writing we also thought about a title. There was a variant of ‘The Rainforest Yoga Class’ and I said I didn’t want the word ‘yoga’ in it. The reason yoga was in the novel was because I’ve been practising it since 1993 and teaching since 2002, yet despite my deep immersion in the practice I felt instinctively that putting the word in the title would imply that the whole novel was about yoga, whereas really the class was a device to bring the three main characters – Grace Maud, Dorothy and Patricia – together.

Listen to the first chapter of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House

My working title was ‘Treehouse’ as I’d had an earlier idea called ‘The Treehouse by the Water’s Edge’ (this later formed the basis of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society). So we tried to work treehouse into the title. Fail.

Then I thought about focusing on the day of the week the characters went to class: a Thursday. They also had coffee together from time to time so ‘Thursday Ladies Coffee Group’ was suggested. It just didn’t feel right.

By this stage I knew there were likely to be flowers on the cover, as there had been on the previous two novels, The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club and The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle. There were flowers in the text – how could there not be, when the story was set in the tropics? I’d found a website that listed flora native to the area by both scientific and common names, and I’d chosen the orange blossom orchid (seen below) as the favourite flower of the yoga teacher, Sandrine. There was also mention of Burdekin plums, so I suggested those and the orchid for the cover. [Photo below by Lakeview_images, from iStock.]

Then it struck me: orange blossom orchid sounded like something. ‘Thursdays’ plus ‘orange blossom orchid’ really sounded like something. If I called Sandrine’s school Orange Blossom Orchid House, maybe we were there. So I suggested Thursdays at Orange Blossom Orchid House, even though I knew it was a little unwieldy.

The publisher, Fiona Hazard, came back with Thursdays at Orange Blossom House and straightaway I knew her instinct to chop out ‘orchid’ was right.

This is the only one of my covers that features a flower that has a direct reference to the title, and how lovely it is that the connection could be made. You’ll also see orange lilies and tropical foliage on it, standing out against the soft salmon pink. Or maybe it’s not salmon pink. What do you think?

Regardless of what we call the colour, Christa Moffitt of Christabella Designs made another beautiful cover, as she has with every book. Perhaps the colour was inspired by the sunsets seen in that part of the world, one of which you can see in the image below, of Trinity Beach just north of Cairns. [Photo by Michael Xiao, from iStock.]

Thursdays at Orange Blossom House did not have the start the previous novels had. There were no bookshop visits or events on the cards. There wasn’t much I could do by way of publicity. Everything was tricky in August 2021. But I trusted that the story would find its way to the people who needed and wanted it, and so it proved. Partly thanks, no doubt, to Whileaway Books in Port Douglas, who have supported all of my novels. Huge thanks to them, and to the readers who found the novel in 2021.

Thank you for reading about cover number three! Next week we’ll be in the fictional town of Bellbird River.

Love,

Sophie

What I’m reading

This Dream Will Devour Us by Emma Clancey

This debut YA fantasy from a Sydney medical student is clever and compelling and highly readable. Featuring main character Nora, it’s about power and inequity and magic and celebrity, and the things we’re prepared to do for those we love. Out now in Australia and next year in the USA.

What I’m listening to

Switch On by Sweet Talk

This new album from Melbourne six-piece Sweet Talk is a whole country-soul-groove vibe. Sweet Talk are festival favourites, and this collection of songs shows why. Several of the band’s members have been playing together for years and these songs are tight, and layered, and highly entertaining.

[Cover photo taken from Kuranda Scenic Railway by Jina Ihm, from iStock.]