Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life

‘As I bumped across the water in a leaky tin dinghy I didn’t know that the journey had begun. That the pale yellow house with a corridor of columns and long verandah on the high, rough hill would hold the key to it all…’ At 44 Susan Duncan appeared to have it all. Editor of two of Australia’s top selling women’s magazines, a happy marriage, a jetsetting lifestyle covering stories from New York to Greenland, rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty, the world was her oyster. But when her beloved husband and brother die within three days of each other, her glittering life shatters. In shock, she zips on her work face and soldiers on – until one morning eighteen months later when she simply can’t get out of bed. Heartbreaking, funny and searingly honest, SALVATION CREEK is the story of a woman who found the courage not only to walk away from a successful career and begin again, but to beat the odds in her own battle for survival and find a new life – and love – in a tiny waterside idyll cut off from the outside world.From the terrifying first step of quitting the job that had always anchored her to abandoning herself to a passionate affair that she knows will break her heart, Duncan never flinches from the truth or loses her wicked sense of humour. Even when she finds a paradise on earth only to discover that it may be too late. It’s been said that the greatest risk in life is not to take a risk. Sometimes you have to risk everything to find the only thing you need.

Author Biography

After a 25-year career spanning radio, newspaper and magazine journalism, including editing two of Australia’s top selling women’s magazines, THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY and NEW IDEA, SUSAN DUNCAN woke up one morning and chucked in her job. The decision followed the deaths of her husband and brother. After struggling to begin again, she finally found her own patch of paradise on earth only to discover it might already be too late when she was diagnosed with cancer herself. Today Susan lives with her second husband, Bob, on the shores of Pittwater at Tarrangaua, the beautiful home built for poet Dorothea Mackellar in 1925. Susan’s bestselling memoir, SALVATION CREEK, won the 2007 Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award and was shortlisted for the prestigious Dobbie Award, part of the Nita B Kibble awards for women writers.