Sue is a best-selling author with book sales in excess of 100,000 copies, specialising in non-fiction.
Her first books, The Clothesline Diet series were published by Pan Macmillan in Australia and Harlequin in the United States. In 2015 she won a prestigious Sassy Award for her book Behind Closed Doors, published by Simon & Schuster, which was also a finalist in the 2016 Davitt Awards.
The highly acclaimed Blood on the Rosary was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018 followed by the epic Australian outback memoir A Diamond In The Dust, which will also be published in Germany in 2020.
Sue’s next book is the highly-anticipated The Freedom Circus, a deeply personal story of how her husband’s grandparents used the cover of a Polish circus to escape the Nazis. The Freedom Circus will be published by Penguin Random House in 2020.
4.5/5 stars,
GOODREADS –
‘Picked it up yesterday and didn’t put it down until I finished it.’
‘ Meticulously researched, powerful and incredibly moving,’
Better Reading
‘ Even in a genre defined by its outrageous, and often heart-breaking twists of tragedy and fortune, a new book recounting one Jewish family’s daring escape from wartime Poland has left both the general public and critics enthralled,’
The First News, Poland
‘ The book reads like a historical drama, thick with intensity and marked by horrifying prison scenes, night-time hideouts in the forest and other miraculous feats of survival. Smethurst is a compassionate, sharp writer, offering a unique angle of the war too often described only by men on the front line,’
Jessie Tu, The Age/SMH