In Conversation with Anna Downes

We are delighted to be hosting Anna Downes, internationally bestselling author of The Safe Place and Red River Road, in Ballarat this November with her latest release Dark Days Hotel.  This is a deliciously dark and twisty thriller about health, wealth and our dangerous obsession with the two.
Anna will be in conversation with Renee Price.

One dark winter night, a young woman – barefoot, in silk pyjamas and holding a hotel room key – collapses in the carpark of a Tasmanian hospital. The only witness is Liv, an exhausted emergency nurse who fails to save her.

Haunted by her mistake and determined to discover the woman’s identity, Liv’s search takes her to remote wilds of Macquarie Heads. There an exclusive health resort rises from the coastline: the Aonaran, where the ultra-wealthy come to reset, renew, and remake themselves.

For Liv, whose ‘self-care’ involves sneaking Valium mid-shift and burying everything she feels, this promise is almost enough to distract her from her search.

But the deeper Liv goes, the more unsettling the resort becomes. A staff member has vanished. The guests seem to be watching her. And beneath the Aonaran’s serene surface, a different kind of transformation is taking place – one that will force Liv to ask: what is the true cost of a better life, and is she prepared to pay?

 

ABOUT ANNA DOWNES

Anna Downes is an actor-turned-author who grew up in Sheffield, UK. She studied Drama at the University of Manchester and spent three years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before working extensively in TV and theatre.

Moving to Australia in 2011, she started writing shortly after her second child was born. Her internationally bestselling debut novel, The Safe Place, was published simultaneously in Australia, the US and the UK in 2020 and was shortlisted for the 2021 Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards. The Shadow House was published in 2021 in Australia and New Zealand followed by publication in the UK and the USA in 2022. Both have been translated into over ten different languages.

Her third novel Red River Road was an instant bestseller upon release in 2024, reaching number five on the national Top Ten and spending six weeks as the number one Australian fiction title, and was shortlisted for the 2025 ABIA for General Fiction Book of the Year. Her fourth, Dark Days Hotel, comes out in Australia on October 27th 2026, and in the US in 2027 (publication date TBC).

She now lives on the NSW Central Coast with her family.