Celebrate local Ballarat author Robbi Neal and celebrate the release of her latest novel. 'The Secret World of Connie Star' is a stunning evocation of Australian life through the war to the 1950s. This novel is intimate and sweeping, immediate and dreamlike - a magical rendering of darkness and joy, and the beauty inherent in difference. For readers of Sarah Winman's Still Life, Trent Dalton's All Our Shimmering Skies and Rosalie Ham's The Dressmaker. Robbi Neal has has lived in country Victoria for most of her life and lives only a few of blocks from where her novel The Secret World of Connie Star is set. She loves to walk down Dawson Street past the church her grandfather preached in, the same church with the same columns that appear in in this book.