As a child, Jaclyn Moriarty decided that her greatest quality was probably listening.

“I was very shy and extremely quiet and felt like I had nothing to say to the world,” says the author, sipping a hot drink outside a chocolate shop and café, not far from where she grew up in Waitara, on Sydney’s north shore. “So I just listened to everyone else.”

This personality trait was further supported by a school activity that required 13-year-old Moriarty’s classmates to write something nice about each other in a notebook shared in class. They had come to the same conclusion.

“Next to my name was: ‘Good listener. Good listener. Good listener,'” he says. “So, that’s what I was. I expressed myself in writing instead of speaking.”

Moriarty, a soft-spoken but talkative person, arrives at the cafe with a backpack, a bottle of water, sunglasses and a hat, after a 15-minute walk from his home in Neutral Bay.

Now the award-winning, best-selling author of young adult and adult novels including the Ashbury/Brookfield series, the Colors of Madeleine trilogy, and the Kingdoms and Empires series, the self-confessed chocolate lover returns to the coffee seat where she spent hours writing her new adult novel. Time travel for beginners.

Writing has been Moriarty’s passion since childhood. From an early age, her late father tasked her and her five siblings with writing stories which he read with great interest. He also paid $1.50 for each notebook filled with writing.

Moriarty remembers that day, perhaps inspired by the “charisma and confidence” of her older sister Liane, now the best-selling author of Big little lies, Husband’s secret, Nine perfect strangers and more: he inexplicably changed tactics and turned up the volume.

“It was in Year 11 that I had to give a speech,” he says. “I had written it, interesting topic, a joke, done.

“But suddenly, the night before, I felt this kind of surge, like a kind of cruelty or even madness.”

Discarding the original, he wrote a new speech, this time brimming with extravagant and wild ideas and full of humor. The next day, before a room of expectant faces, his words provoked waves of laughter and applause. Filled with a new sense of euphoria, Moriarty was sold.

“I know that’s when I found my voice,” he says. “It was a huge success. I have no idea what I was saying. I just know it was crazy and the teacher gave me 19 out of 20 for it.

“And I thought, ‘Look, I can be myself and do it well, too.'”

Moriarty spent several years working in law, but her passion for writing and becoming a full-time author has inspired nearly 20 books, many of them bestsellers. She has received awards ranging from the Children’s Book Award from the Queensland Literary Awards to three Ethel Turner Young People’s Literature Awards from the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Time travel for beginnersHe says, it took 20 years to write. Not because it was entertaining, but because it was developed and written while he was writing other books (Kingdoms and Empires fans can look forward to the new book, Astrid and the accidental slip between worldsin November). He also delved into “ridiculous amounts” of historical nonfiction to see what the time travelers in his book witness on their travels.

Set in Sydney, Time travel for beginners centers on the characters Anna, Jade and Teddy, each of whom searches for answers in complicated lives, a search that leads them to a nondescript store called Time Travel Agency. Here, clients are offered to travel anywhere they wish in the past without altering the future in any way.

Do you find it interesting to meet Charlotte Brontë walking on the moors? Or see the construction of Stonehenge? Would it be intriguing to revisit your teenage self? What time in people’s lives would they travel to? And how would it help them understand the present?

Time travel for beginners is about history, but also about how people deal with regrets, the ways parenting affects their lives, and the importance of hope.

Are there places Moriarty would like to travel back to?

“I keep thinking I should prepare myself for that question,” he says, laughing. “It’s also funny because it’s partly a book about parental regrets and I probably should have realized that people will ask me if I have any regrets as a parent.

“Of course, I regret it. Every parent regrets it because you are always learning. Somehow, my son [Charlie] He has turned out to be a magnificent, wonderful and perfect young man.

“But that’s because of him, not me. Actually, the idea for the book came when I was on a bus passing through Neutral Bay and saw a travel agency with a Time magazine billboard next to it. For a moment I truly believed that time travel had been discovered and here was a little shop that offered time travel to people.

“Honestly, I felt elated and excited and dumbfounded. Because why wasn’t it on the news? And, just for a split second, I was intensely excited because I instantly wanted to go back in time, to the 18th century or somewhere with horses and carriages.

“But then I looked back and saw that it was just a sign leaning against the travel agency. So, to cheer myself up, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll write a book about this.'”

Expanding on the idea to travel back in time, when relationships went wrong or mistakes were made as a parent, he explored the nature of remorse, guilt and pain and the sometimes unreliable qualities of memory.

“Regret is designed to prevent you from making mistakes again,” Moriarty says. “So it’s meant to be there. The problem is that it gets stuck in a loop. It becomes a self-destructive system instead of a useful one.

“We’re supposed to have some level of regret, but I’ve found that if you say, okay, that was a mistake, the reason I did it wrong was because of that and I forgive myself, and now we move on.”

Time travel for beginnersFilled with humor and heartfelt explorations of being human, it also takes our conversation to Moriarty’s own parents. His gift, he says, was the ability to always be delighted with her and her brothers.

“Mom is extraordinary, a great storyteller,” he says. “We had her classic books on the shelves and she took us to the library every week at the Hornsby Library, one of the great joys and pleasures of my life.

“And my dad. If I could get into the time travel agency, I would like to go back and say to my dad, ‘You’re extraordinary.’ He knew I loved him, but I don’t think I ever said to him, ‘You’re extraordinary, you’re incredible.’

“He came from a fairly difficult working class background, became an aerial photographer and surveyor, and achieved this thanks to his incredible strength and determination to make a dream come true.

“He wanted that for us, too. He kept saying, ‘Find a way to make money doing what you love. Find what you love and go from there.'”

Time travel for beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty is published by Ultimo ($35).