Behind the Pen with Carla Caruso

I’m so pleased to welcome Carla Caruso to Behind the Pen, chatting about family, food, and her gorgeous new novel, The Right Place.

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What provided the main inspiration point for The Right Place?

Family! Even though the characters are fictional, the plot and setting draw a lot of inspiration from my family background and Italian ancestry.

The novel’s set on a market garden on Adelaide’s busy Marion Road, like where my ad grew up as one of 10 kids! The real-life property was actually sold decades ago, making way for a self-storage facility, but this is me imagining that it still exists.

The nonna character, though, is inspired by my grandma on my mum’s side, and the sandstone villa on the market garden is actually inspired by her place in the east. It’s a place I visited a lot in the school holidays or whenever there was a family occasion to celebrate or Nonna wanted me to take her food shopping!

Like the heroine’s mother, my mum is also a former fashion designer, but she’s a lot nicer in personality.