Albany author John M. Taylor launches second edition of bestseller I Will Find You at Paperbark Merchants

Albany author John M. Taylor will launch the second edition of his novel I Will Find You in Albany this weekend.

Taylor will launch the book at Paperbark Merchants on York Street on Saturday, and will sign copies of his book in-store from 10am.

The first edition was published in 2017, and Taylor has since taken the book back into his own hands to release the new edition.

The book is a sweeping Australian saga — the story of a young boy who arrives in Fremantle in the 1940s under the child migration scheme, which sent UK children across the globe, often with changed names and false documents, to live in Australia.

In Perth, the boy is placed in a cruel institution before running away to live deep in the outback with Indigenous people.

His circumstances tragically change and, although he only knows life deep in the outback, he sets out to find his mother in a very unfamiliar world.

The story is fictional but based on true events and encounters, and took five years to write and research.

Taylor said meeting child migration victims for the first time was an overwhelming experience.

“I read Margaret Humphreys’ Empty Cradles and then later met survivors of child migration,” he said.

“I’m not ashamed to say I cried hearing their stories, and I realised very quickly that these people wanted to have their stories and their voices heard, and nobody aside from Margaret had really written anything about it so I decided I needed to do it.

“I gave up for nearly two years, because the material I was researching was too gutting, too heartbreaking, but I started again because I felt I had made a kind of promise to these people who had poured their hearts out to me.

“I didn’t write this book for me, for any notoriety or fame. I wrote it for the people who had to live through these things themselves, whose experiences were denied and overlooked by the authorities for years.

“I still feel that way, 10 years later.”

Taylor is now working on adapting his screenplay of the story into a Netflix-style episode structure.

“A Perth producer originally picked it up, but after nearly two years decided they didn’t have the resources to take it on,” Taylor said.

“Since then, another producer has taken interest and gotten a UK production company involved as well, so it’s all looking very positive.

“When I told friends of mine that the story was going to become a film, someone said to me, ‘you know there’s no money in films, right?’ I just laughed, because that is so far from what’s important about publishing this story and getting it to the screen for me.”