New author Zacharey Jane explores identity

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The BBWF blogger overheard Zacharey Jane talking to a festival-goer and wanted to find out more.  Her first novel The Lifeboat published in April is about a man and a woman washed up on the shore of an island nation. They have no memory of who they are or how they got there or even who the other person is – they have complete dissasociative amnesia. The novel is told in the voice of a 21-year-old government interpreter, herself a migrant who is given two weeks to discover who they are, and how they came to be there before the worst is assumed.
It is set in a time where there were still pirates – just after world war two. The core idea is about identity. Are we intrinsically ourselves? Do we grow up to be the person we were going to be or are we the sum total of our life’s events? It’s a juxtaposition of two people at the end of their lives or heading towards the end of their lives who should be surrounded by friends and family with a girl who is at the beginning of her life and has had a secluded childhood. She is a blank slate while the couple are people who should be comfortable in their lives but aren’t because this trauma has stripped their lives away from them. Empathy grows between them. Jane was in the film industry and a painter – she still paints.
Zacharey Jane finds writing logistically much easy. “I find writing really therapeutic. I couldn’t paint if I was depressed and would have to walk away whereas with writing it always makes me feel better.”

Jane’s husband’s work is likely to bring her to the Northern Rivers soon from Toowoomba.

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