'Two first-time novelists have brought their experience and fascination to works set far from home. Tony Grey’s The Tortoise in Asia takes place in the last century BC along the Silk Road... Debra Jopson, who won a Walkley Award for independent journalism in 2014, "spent part of her childhood in Beirut and continued to visit her family there during the first rounds of the 1970s Lebanon civil war." She has drawn on those memories for Oliver of the Levant (Peter Pierce).