As a Walkley Award winning journalist Sarah Armstrong has always had a good eye for a story. Working for the ABC, she reported and produced for such programs as AM, PM, The World Today and Foreign Correspondent, winning the Walkley in 1993 for a radio feature on diggers returning to Gallipoli.
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"It's incredibly exhilarating and exciting when you're working on those short turnaround programs," Armstrong says. "I got caught up in it all but then I realised I wasn't doing what I really wanted to do, which was write."
Armstrong had always wanted to be a writer, she still has a manila folder full of stories she wrote as a child, but she realised journalism would pay the bills and for seven years the ABC was her calling.
"But one day I woke up and thought I didn't want to get to the end of my life and look back and think I could have written a novel, so I left.
"It was such a clear decision, even though I had this fantastic job with the ABC and met some amazing people, and worked with some amazing colleagues. I think in a way I was not all that suited to it."
She left Sydney in 1996 and moved to Mullumbimby, on the far north coast of New South Wales, living in a rustic cabin in the rainforest. For the first four months it rained non-stop, providing inspiration for her first novel Salt Rain, which went on to be shortlisted for several prizes including the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2005.
When she began thinking about her second novel she came across a news story about a man who had two wives, two families, and lived a double life for many years.
"I kept thinking about it afterwards," she says.
"How did that happen, how did he end up in that situation, how did he keep it secret, what did it mean for everyone when they found out?
"As I began feeling my way into the story and the main character, the more I mentioned to people what I was writing about, seven or eight times out of 10 the person I was talking to said they knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who was living that life too.
"That really astounded me, that it was more common than I could imagine."
His Other House is the story of Dr Quinn Douglas. He lives in Brisbane with his wife Marianna; the pair have endured years of unsuccessful IVF and several miscarriages. Their marriage is feeling the strain. Quinn decides to work two days a week in a small country town a few hours away and there he meets Rachel, the daughter of one of his elderly patients, and the pair are instantly drawn to each other and begin a passionate affair.
"It was a fascinating moral question for me," says Armstrong. "How did it all happen and who was in the right and who was in the wrong? Was there a right and a wrong?"
Armstrong thinks the real failure was Quinn not telling Marianna the truth.
"She was unable to choose her own life path based on a knowledge of what was truly going on, and that's a terrible, terrible wrong."
But then each relationship is different, she says, each has its own line that may or may not be crossed.
"Is absolute honesty necessary in a relationship? Is that helpful? Do you tell your partner when you're attracted to someone else, when you flirt with someone else, or should the line fall when you kiss someone else, when you have sex with someone else? Where does that line fall?
"I strive for absolute honesty in my own relationships and that's not always comfortable for me or my partner.
"It can be an interesting conversation to have with your partner. We tend to hide the less desirable parts of ourselves but when we show that part of ourselves it creates connection.
"I try to be as frank as I can but I'm definitely a work in progress."
* His Other House, by Sarah Armstrong. Macmillan. $29.99.
