Melbourne author Melanie Joosten's debut novel Berlin Sydrome is a psychological thriller that our own Christine Gordon says is 'a ripper of a tale' in her review of the book. Melanie has written a guest blog post to tell us the story behind the book, including her reflections on love, Stockholm Syndrome and the fall of the Berlin wall.

I have often wondered why we say we fall in love. It is something many of us aspire to, or remember fondly. It is accompanied by feelings of delight and happiness and awe. But falling is rarely a delight. When we fall, we scrape our knees or break our hips. We end up bruised, grazed, stiff and sore. And yet, this is how we talk about love. We dream of being weak at the knees, swept off our feet and tumbling into the kind of love affair that swallows us whole.

And maybe that is part of the attraction. We get caught up in love, and with it comes a small amount of terror – that we may lose ourselves, our very identity, to another person. ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. And there is something strangely enticing about this. It is this idea that enthralled me. Despite all of the books that have been written about love (its possibility, its existence, its aftermath), I wanted to write my own. To this end, I asked what would happen if two people jumped headlong into love? If they gave free reign to their hearts rather than their heads. If they refused to play by the rules and skipped the everyday niceties – the dates, the cute text messages, the long nights in bars, the lazy breakfasts – and went straight into something more?

When people create their own insular world, a mutual dependency occurs. Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological condition that can develop when a captive forms an attachment to their captor. Despite the power imbalance of the situation, the captive feels empathy for the very person who is holding them hostage. Isn’t this exactly how we feel about love? That we know we might get battered and bruised yet we offer ourselves up again and again. We forgive love (and our lover) any number of things we may not forgive another. Berlin Syndrome is an exploration of the kind of obsessive love that becomes bigger and more encompassing that it has any right to be.

And why Berlin? I was eight years old and living in Ballarat when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember watching the footage on ABC News, my parents staring at the television transfixed, and ignoring my questions as they listened to the reports. What about the Iron Curtain? I asked. Has that gone too? And why was everyone so excited about bananas? Had they really never seen them before? Fourteen years later, backpacking through Europe, I made my way to Berlin. It seemed to me a city at the heart of recent history, emerging again and again from the upheaval of the past. It could not be more different from the peace of the cities back home. As I walked Berlin’s streets, I crossed the line of cobblestones that marked the path of the Wall, time and time again. I asked people what it was like then, but most of the Germans I met were my age. The Wall, or the Mauer, as they knew it, was a memory of their childhood, slippery and elusive, and left behind with everything else in the rush to grow up.

What was it like to live with one’s freedom so curtailed? To not be able to leave (and return) at will, not to mention all of the other restrictions imposed on a person’s life? For many people it was a life of frustration, constantly coming up against the authorities with dire consequences. For others it was a changed life, but a life all the same. Adapted to circumstances, yet with all the joys that are found anywhere: births, celebrations – and love. And, of course, just like love, the fall of the Berlin Wall did bring feelings of delight and happiness and awe – and so much more.

Berlin Syndrome is out now in paperback and ebook.

Star of ABC TV's Laid Alison Bell will launch Berlin Syndrome this Thursday at the Bella Union Bar at Trades Hall, Melbourne.