Debut novel by part time Coast resident hits the shelves

Part time Killcare resident Deborah Pike’s debut novel The Players has been published by Fremantle Press and was released in early April.

It will be launched officially in Sydney on May 11 by The Australian’s chief literary critic Geordie Williamson, followed by a Q and A with actor and musician Tim Minchin and Pike herself.

Pike, a writer and academic based in Sydney who grew up in Northam and Perth, Western Australia, has an Honours degree in English from the University of Western Australia, and a PhD from the University of Sydney.

She is an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.

Pike spends her time between Killcare and Sydney and wrote almost all the book while at Killcare.

“I am a half-time Central Coast resident, and the book was largely written in Killcare,” she said.

“I do pretty much all of my writing in Killcare; I mind a house there.

“I’ve been going there for 10 years.”

The Players is a work of literary fiction, an Australian coming-of-age story about the lives and loves of 20-somethings, across 10 years and six countries, who meet in a university theatre group and never quite leave the drama behind.

The novel offers different perspectives with dramatically diverse points of view, reflecting different social classes, beliefs, nationalities, cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations.

Described as “a sweeping epic of friendship where all the world’s a stage”, it’s about a group of young amateur actors and their lives spanning the globe, half of it set in Perth, and the other half in Berlin, Dili, London, Paris and Berlin.

It is told from multiple perspectives with some meta-themes in it around the roles the characters perform in The Marriage of Figaro.

The novel focuses on the formation of identity through art, vocation, family, class and culture.

The plot focuses on the various literal, emotional and moral journeys of the primary characters.

Major plot revelations radically alter the self-perceptions and actions of the characters, becoming focal points for the various arcs that are explored from multiple perspectives.

Readers of literary fiction will enjoy the complexity of all the characters, as well as the open-ended conclusion, which raises questions rather than provides simple answers to the complicated realities of life.