Emily Brewin

Emily Brewin is a Melbourne writer whose fiction examines private lives within social change. Hello, Goodbye, her first published novel, is set in 1968 and follows seventeen-year-old May Callaghan as pregnancy, family expectations, conscription, and the Vietnam War reshape her future. Allen & Unwin published the book in 2017 and presents May's move from rural Australia as the moment when a wider political world enters her life. Goodreads independently confirms Brewin's byline, the exact title, publication year, and historical-fiction classification. Together, those sources support the book's central connection between an intimate formative experience and the upheaval surrounding the Vietnam War. Hello, Goodbye is consequently both a personal story and a historical portrait of choices constrained by religion, gender, and national service. Brewin's focus stays close to May's experience, letting one young woman's altered circumstances illuminate a turbulent period in Australian public and domestic life while keeping family relationships at the center of the novel.