GABRIEL BERGMOSER is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. His latest book Andromache Between Worlds is an action-packed adventure that follows teenager Andromache Peters as she travels across universes to save her father. We caught up with the author to discuss his latest book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
All fourteen-year-old Andromache Peters wants is a normal life. But normal is pretty near impossible when your parents were famous adventurers who saved the world and nobody will let you forget it.
On top of this, Andromache’s father has been missing and presumed dead since she was only two, and her mother has retreated into grief ever since. So it’s no surprise that the last thing Andromache needs is to be reminded of where she came from.
But when a mysterious stranger reveals that Andromache’s father is not only still alive but trapped in a parallel world, Andromache is thrown into a daring journey across other universes to find and save the father she never knew.
A journey so strange and dangerous that it will forever transform Andromache’s life to anything but normal.
MEET GABRIEL BERGMOSER
What sparked the idea for your novel Andromache Between Worlds?
I’ve always loved imagining what the world might look like if one thing in our history had changed. What if we never discovered electricity? What if the dinosaurs never died out? What if we’d met aliens on our first trip to the moon?
But to me the more interesting questions are the ones about what our own lives might have been if things had gone differently. What if we were raised by somebody other than our parents? Would we think the same, act the same, even have the same name?
These are gigantic questions and the fun of a book like Andromache Between Worlds is that we can explore all of them in big, crazy, action-packed ways that hopefully still give you something to think about.
What can you tell us about Andromache Peters and the adventures she will go on?
Andromache Peters is the 14-year-old daughter of two world famous adventurers. She’s never felt able to live up to either of them and just about everyone her own age is either jealous of her or so nervous they can barely speak to her. Plus, Andromache’s father has been dead since she was just a baby and her mother is always busy with work, leaving Andromache very, very lonely.
But when she finds out that her father is not dead but in fact trapped in a parallel universe, she sets out on a desperate adventure to save him with the help of two other misfits. Along the way she will face terrible dangers and dark secrets that will force her to either prove herself – or die trying.
Can you tell us a bit about the parallel worlds in your story?
I wanted the parallel worlds in Andromache to be a mix of fun, weird and scary – if not all three at once. Some of them were just settings I thought would be cool; for example, what if there was a Wild West full of cowboys – except they’re always being chased by dinosaurs? Or what if Ancient Egypt had not only survived into the present day but taken over the world as well?
But it was important to me that every world also made Andromache confront something about herself or her parents or her life, usually through seeing what a different version might have been like. The device Andromache uses to travel between worlds is guided by her DNA, meaning that wherever she goes she will find SOMEBODY connected to her – maybe a parallel version of herself or her mother… or maybe, eventually, her long lost father.
If you could visit yourself in a parallel universe – would you? And why or why not?
It’s such a good question because I don’t really know the answer to it. I mean, we always wonder what could have been if things had gone slightly differently, and it would be hard to resist getting to learn the answer to that. But at the same time, there’s a line in the book I really like where Andromache’s friend Rylee tells her to worry about ‘what is’, not ‘what if’. I think that’s really important to remember – in real life we can’t travel between different universes, so it’s best to learn to be happy in the one we’ve got.
What are some of the most important lessons Andromache learns on her adventures?
For a pretty small book, Andromache learns a lot in this story – in fact, I feel a bit guilty about putting her through so much! But they’re lessons I think we all have to learn at some point, lessons like how what you think or feel matters less than what you choose to do about it, or how your parents are as human as you are even if they can sometimes seem unknowable.
What are you working on next?
Way too much! I’ve almost finished my next action/thriller book for older readers, and then I would love to continue the story of Andromache and her friends. There are a lot of universes out there to explore…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. He won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award in 2015, and was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing. His first young adult novel, Boone Shepard, was shortlisted for the Readings Young Adult Prize, and his second YA book, The True Colour of a Little White Lie, was published in 2021. Andromache Between Worlds is Gabriel’s first middle-grade book.
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