JUNE BAPTISTA
Franciska Soares writes hauntingly poignant literary fiction featuring enigmatic histories, forgotten communities and spirited, unbowed women. The product of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, she claims the characters who populate her books often give her a bit of a fright. That’s because Franciska is a conformist and hates confrontation. In fact, her friends and family claim she’s a Miss Goody-two-shoes and she doesn’t mind that portrayal one bit as it rings true. Her characters on the other hand love to challenge the status quo and are not averse to pushing the boundaries, sexual or ethical. They are imperfect and flawed and that’s what makes them human, memorable, Franciska alleges.
When she isn’t reading or writing poetry and fiction (the iambic pace of her prose oftentimes resounds like a drumbeat), Franciska is probably walking the picturesque Frankton Arm in Queenstown meditating on her writing and the snow-capped Remarkables that tower over Lake Wakatipu, container gardening, or watching edgy black comedy on Netflix.
A Chemistry dropout, Franciska headed a faculty having earned two Master’s degrees: in Commerce and in Education. However, a flurry of life events – divorce, the loss of her hearing, COVID – freed her, she says to focus back on her very first loves, words and history. Back to writing. An itch exacerbated by the regret of omission that has led to the publication of her debut novel: They Whisper in My Blood. A second novel A Smatter of Minutes is with her editor Laurie Chittenden and is slated for publication in 2023; as is an anthology of poetry entitled Quiet Enough. Tag along with Franciska on her latest pursuits on Facebook, Instagram (soaresfranciska) and Tiktok(franciskasoares62).
Genre:
- Adult Fiction
- Children's Fiction
- Non-Fiction
- Romance
- Poetry
Skills:
- Competition Judging
- Novelist
- Poetry Readings
- Readings (adults)
- Reviews
- Subtitling
Branch:
Otago/Southland
Location:
Queenstown
Publications:
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They Whisper in My Blood
Literary Fiction/Historical Fiction/Historical Romance
Perpetua Cabral, a Portuguese-Indian living in Queenstown, New Zealand has always found herself being pulled by emotions she doesn’t quite understand. What starts off as a compulsion to delve into her family’s past and look for answers, emerges as an urgent need to transform her own jejune life as she finds herself being catapulted into a world of intrigue, passion, and murder.
They Whisper in My Blood is a saga of two families, one Indian and one Portuguese, thrown together by colonialism. Though severed by the cruelty of disparate cultures they are ultimately united by the power of love.
This is, therefore, a love story – a sweeping panorama that screams across time and continents.
Fans of authors like Arundhati Roy, Delia Owens, and Richard Powers will love this multi-generational tale. Nature’s spontaneous beauty is reverenced in sentences that weave lush imagery, so evocative one can almost smell the spice. The characters, visceral, impassioned, and deeply flawed, are bound to stay with you long after the last page is turned.
Quiet Enough
Language, myths, stories, and even our understanding of reality are usually expressed in the form of opposition. The sacred and the profane, absence and presence, male and female. Very fittingly opposition is the central theme that pervades this seemingly disparate collage of lyrical compositions. Franciska Soares, who has progressively lost her hearing, claims that it is only in her brand-new silent world that she has discovered her ability to hear. Using poetry, with its quintessential sacramental nature, she gives the reader an opportunity to experience this rapture.
There’s no need for a poet’s ear to discern the music, the nuances. And like an artist, she has kept her poems incomplete and open. Quiet Enough is most definitely a work of art, and one for the desk, not the bookshelf.
A Smatter of Minutes
Haunted by the memory of her parent's murders, Chef Abigail Moore's life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Only a toddler, she is packed off to her loving grandmother who is fashioned from the same clay as she is. Gramme Kathleen lives in a small close-knit Roman Catholic community on Gloriosa Street, a street that crackles with the energy of its people; oddball characters who live secret lives, camouflaged, rendered almost invisible in a country that teems with billions, India. It is here she meets the mysterious Isaac and her best friend Marconi, members of a strange family who live in a shuttered house having cut all ties with the neighbourhood.
On Gramme’s death, Abigail is set adrift once more and decides to return to New Zealand, the country of her birth. There she is reunited with her half-brothers Robert and Kenneth. Though they are strangers to her, she cannot deny the tenuous link she shares with them— memories of that terrifying night when she found her parents melting. Memory, they say can be imperfect, and can throw up surprises, as Abigail soon discovers …
A Smatter of Minutes paints a picture of the kind of character growth that will have you rooting for the underdog, Abigail Moore, in hopes she’ll someday blunder into the amazing person she’s meant to be.
Reviews:
Franciska Soares has composed a nuanced, yet powerful novel that touches all the senses as it moves from New Zealand to India and back. Layer-by-layer we discover the truth behind one night that forever changed the lives of one woman and her patchwork family. — Laurie Chittenden, Editor, New York, United States.
Gloriosa Street is chaotic and bright and swamped with sound and smell and vision and noise and tastes. — Dr Lauren Roche, Best-selling author of Bent not Broken & Mila and the Bone Man