Miles Franklin Award-winning author Sofie Laguna’s new novel, The Underworld, has been billed as “one for every reader you know,” but especially for anyone who has ever been 14.

Released just this week, The Underworld looks set to be another success for Laguna, whose 2014 novel The Eye of the Sheep won the 2015 Miles Franklin Award, followed by Infinite Splendours, a magnificent portrayal of an artist haunted by childhood trauma.

Now in her fourth novel, Laguna turns the spotlight a bit closer to her own experiences.

In the book, Martha is fascinated by the underworld — a place she first learns about in classical mythology classes at school, particularly the myth of the ferryman Charon and his barge across the River Styx.

To Martha, this underworld and its divine inhabitants become a realm of refuge, imagination and desire. Yet it’s her band of school friends who show her the joy of spontaneity, fun and laughter — until things go wrong.

Set between 1974 and the early 1980s, The Underworld is dedicated to a Latin teacher who taught at the school that inspired Dalheath, Martha’s fictional boarding school in the Southern Highlands.

This book holds a special interest for me — in another life, I was Sofie Laguna’s drama teacher for four years at just such a NSW establishment.

My curiosity was piqued when I received a Facebook message from Laguna telling me: “You are in it.” My first thought was that she had given me a small acknowledgment at the end of the book, but a subsequent message from one of her old classmates suggested that I might really be in it.

I am certainly not the Latin teacher – that character was modelled on one of my colleagues – but the idea that I might appear, however transformed, has me pondering the intriguing imagination of a novelist.

This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to me: having a novelist in my own family, I’ve often discovered that my “witty” remarks made over breakfast have found their way into fiction. But a word of caution for anyone who thinks a novelist is a biographer – the metamorphosis of real people and events into art is an entirely different and fascinating process.

Laguna is a true novelist in every sense, one who mines real life for story and turns it into prose through the transformative power of imagination.

The Underworld was officially released on Tuesday, and I’m off to buy a copy — I can’t wait.

Meet the Author: Sofie Laguna in conversation with Canberra author Karen Viggers. Lowitja O’Donoghue Centre, ANU (Kambri), November 6.
The Underworld, by Sofie Laguna. Penguin Random House, released November 2025.