Mostly, in the week before delivering a festival of words built on a rather boring bedrock of logistics, I read emails (tornadoes of them!), spreadsheets, and Google Docs. If Google Docs were counted as shared assets, co-director Antonia Hayes and I would pretty much be married.

But somewhere in between all these crunchy details, I find the time to dip into Eleanor Catton’s debut novel The Rehearsal. It’s an apt choice in many ways. Firstly, it happens to be the chosen read for the festival’s book club event, which was a totally handy coincidence (swear!). Secondly, it’s a novel by a super-young, over-achieving author who probably would’ve been a National Young Writers’ Festival regular had she lived in Australia (she’s from New Zealand). And lastly, because it so cleverly captures that time before ‘real life’ begins—adolescence as a ‘rehearsal’ for the big stage of the world.