Creative writing and law aren’t typically careers that would go hand-in-hand but one Australian has combined her two passions to create a novel inspired by the Sea to Sky Corridor.
By day, Samantha Little is an Australian criminal and family lawyer from Albury-Wodonga, but by night she is a writer who after two years has released her psychological thriller book The Cure.
“Writing is something I have always done, since I was about four years old. I would dictate stories to my mum and she would type them up on the computer for me. I found one of them recently and it was terrible, but not bad for a four-year-old I suppose,” Little told The Squamish Chief.
“As I became an adult, writing became how I breathe and is very much a part of who I am. I wrote through school, university, and I have continued to write before or after work, or whenever I can really make time to.
“It helps me to process the more difficult aspects of my job, and is my way of being mindful. I have noticed that if I don’t write, I tend to ruminate on what needs to be done the next day or what occurred during the day.”
Setting the scene
Her newest book was inspired by a dream, and is set in a fictional Canadian town inspired by the corridor.
“The Cure was inspired by a dream that I had, or a nightmare more appropriately. It was very much my subconscious bleeding through, and it was not until I had finished writing it and really delved into some of the concepts like alcoholism and control and love, that I truly realized how much the themes in the novel take from my day to day work as a family and criminal lawyer,” Little said.
“[The story] is about a brilliant medical student haunted by her father’s death from a rare disease. When she’s abducted by her professor and forced to work in an underground lab to develop a cure, she’s forced to confront impossible moral choices. It’s a story about power, control, and what people will sacrifice—for love, for science, and for redemption.”
Little said she wanted the fictional town in the story—called Brunswick Shire—to be a place that felt vast, beautiful but isolating.
“Somewhere you could disappear—willingly or not. The Sea to Sky Corridor—between Whistler and Squamish—captured exactly what I needed: remote beauty, a sense of distance, and the quiet danger of isolation,” Little said in a news release.
“There’s something haunting about that landscape. It felt like the perfect backdrop for a story about control, survival, and fractured trust. It’s a landscape that lends itself to both wonder and danger, which mirrors the emotional tone of the book.”
While she hasn’t been to Canada herself, it was stories of life in Whistler and the Sea to Sky region that stuck with her throughout the conception of The Cure.
“Growing up in Australia, Whistler was one of those places that was often advertised as a dream destination—almost mythical in its beauty and just out of reach. There was a kind of magic in that distance, in the way it was talked about as somewhere far removed from everyday life,” Little said.
“That sense of wonder and mystery really stayed with me, and it shaped how I built Brunswick Shire—as a place that could be both enchanting and quietly unsettling.”
She also used images taken by her grandmother to paint the picture of what Brunswick Shire would look like.
“My grandmother travelled quite extensively before I was born and many of the photographs she took on old slides inspired the setting of [the book].
The Cure was released on May 23 and is available to purchase online and requested at local bookstores.
