Two for the road
Back in 2011, Graeme Simsion and his wife, Anne Buist, were walking from France to Spain, along the ancient pilgrim’s route known as the “Camino”—the Way—when they came upon a fellow traveller: a 19-year-old from Belgium. “We told him we were both aspiring writers,” Simsion tells WHO, with a smile. “He said, ‘Well, obviously, what you need to do is write a book together, set on the Camino. It could be a love story about old people like you.’ ”
By the time Simsion, who worked in IT, and Buist, a psychiatrist, reached their destination— the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, in Galicia—87 days and 2,038km after they’d set out, the idea had taken hold. But when they returned home to Melbourne, other projects overtook it. For Simsion, these included a little book called The Rosie Project— his 2013 debut novel became an international smash hit—and Buist was contracted to write two thrillers: 2015’s Medea’s Curse, and 2016’s Dangerous to Know.
Finally ready to tackle their Camino story in mid-2012, Simsion and Buist wrote separate novels from each protagonist’s point of view. “Then we left it for four years,” says Simsion, explaining that they decided to walk the Camino again last year to “get this right.” The result is their first joint novel, Two Steps Forward (Text Publishing, $29.99), a life-affirming story of rediscovery and love that quickly caught