FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday 12 May 2026
HarperCollinsPublishers Australia is delighted to announce the imminent publication of The World Beneath Her Feet by award-winning and bestselling author Holly Ringland. The World Beneath Her Feet is Ringland’s third novel and it will be published by Fourth Estate on 1 September 2026.
Ringland is the author of two internationally bestselling and multi-award-winning novels, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, and one nationally bestselling work of non-fiction, The House that Joy Built. Her books have sold over 600,000 copies globally and been published in over 30 international territories. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart was adapted for an award-winning seven-episode series starring Sigourney Weaver.
The World Beneath Her Feet is a luminous and deeply emotional novel about belonging,
memory and the loves and landscapes that make us – and what it takes to come home
to ourselves and each other. When the novel opens, Maggie Byrd is in her late thirties
and living a charmed life in London. She works with fossils and gems at the Natural
History Museum and shares a home with the two people she loves most: her best
friend, Harriet, and her partner, Joe. However, beneath this carefully constructed facade
lies a past Maggie buried deep inside herself and resolved never to unearth: the story of
a guilt-ridden, heartbroken girl who left Australia in her early twenties and swore never
to return. But when she learns that she's inherited her beloved uncle's rewilded land in a
lush valley of southeast Queensland, Maggie's London life begins to fracture.
Holly Ringland said: ‘The World Beneath Her Feet is a novel from the core of my heart,
mirroring many things I’ve been contemplating in the last few years: the parts of
ourselves we bury in order to survive, the unresolved past that can shape the rest of our
lives, and the people and places that call us home. I hope Maggie Byrd’s journey
reminds readers that even after heartbreak, guilt and years of silence, it is still
possible – no matter how unlikely – to find unexpected treasure in what we’ve left
behind, if we have the courage to unearth it and allow it to enrich who we’ve become.
Publishing a new novel with Catherine Milne and HarperCollins continues to be
everything my younger, past self dreamed of when I was sixteen. I am deeply grateful,
and very excited to introduce this book to readers.’
Catherine Milne, Head of Fiction and Fourth Estate Publisher, said: ‘A new Holly
Ringland novel is something to celebrate. Holly is the most extraordinary storyteller –
tender, lyrical, profound, funny, wise – and her ability to balance between the dark and
the light, between grief and joy, and reach a place where she connects with, enchants,
comforts, moves and inspires readers, is unparalleled. The World Beneath Her Feet is
visually lush, cinematic, powerfully emotional and uplifting – I can’t wait for it to meet its
readers.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holly Ringland is a writer, storyteller and TV presenter. She is the author of the
international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which has been translated into
thirty languages and adapted into a seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver. In
2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award General
Fiction Book of the Year. In 2021, Holly co-hosted an eight-episode ABC TV series, Back
to Nature, with Aaron Pedersen. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years,
Holly has been based in the Yugambeh/Bundjalung regions of southeast Queensland
since 2020, where she wrote her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, in her
‘office’, a vintage caravan named Frenchie. Upon publication, The Seven Skins of Esther
Wilding became an instant national bestseller, and it was named Booktopia’s 2022 Book
of the Year. In 2023, Holly published her first non-fiction book, the national bestseller
The House That Joy Built, about the essential power of creativity, something she
continues to write about in her beloved and bestselling Substack The Joy Rise.
ABOUT HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
HarperCollins Publishers is the second largest consumer book publisher in the world,
with operations in 17 countries. With over 200 years of history and more than 120
branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new
books every year, in over 30 languages, and has a print and digital catalogue of more
than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include
winners of the Miles Franklin Award, the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National
Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. Publishing Australian stories since 1888,
HarperCollins Publishers Australia, incorporating the Angus & Robertson imprint, is
Australia’s foundation publisher. It is a subsidiary of News Corp.