Tell my readers your book title, the genre for your book and the time frame it takes place.
My book is The Doctor’s Burden, a contemporary Christian novel set in the fictional Western Cape town of Cedarfontein. It takes place over the course of 2026, during Dr Marissa Rossouw’s compulsory community-service year at Sinethemba Community Hospital.
Although it is Christian fiction, I’d probably describe it just as much as a story about people, relationships and belonging. Faith is an important part of Marissa’s journey, but so are friendship, family, community and learning to live with the things in life that can’t simply be fixed.
Give us a short book blurb about your story and characters.
Dr Marissa Rossouw arrives in Cedarfontein determined to do one thing: get through her community-service year and leave. She is carrying the burden of a patient’s death during her internship and has lost confidence not only in herself as a doctor, but in a faith that once came far more easily to her. Cedarfontein, however, has other ideas.
At Sinethemba Community Hospital, the formidable Dr Marius de Lange refuses to let her hide behind self-doubt. At number thirteen Jakaranda Laan, Hennie and Elna gradually become the family she didn’t know she needed. And then there’s Liam Hartley, a flight paramedic who alternately irritates, challenges and makes her laugh, and who seems remarkably unwilling to accept the walls she has built around herself.
Marissa comes to Cedarfontein expecting to serve a community for a year. She doesn’t expect the community to change her.
I’ve always been fascinated by the enormous responsibility we place on doctors, particularly young doctors. We expect them to make difficult decisions, sometimes when the answers aren’t obvious, and then somehow cope emotionally when things don’t turn out as everyone hoped.
That became the starting point for Marissa. I wanted to write about a doctor who hadn’t stopped caring but had stopped trusting herself. From there, the story became about much more than medicine. I became interested in the difference between guilt and responsibility, and in how easily we can allow one experience to become the lens through which we judge everything about ourselves.
The Our House on Jakaranda Laan setting gave me a wonderful way to explore the other side of that. Marissa arrives believing she needs to be left alone. Instead, she lands in a street where people notice when you’re struggling, feed you whether you’re hungry or not, interfere in your life with the very best intentions and gradually become family.
I think that contrast is really at the heart of The Doctor’s Burden. Marissa believes she needs isolation. What she actually needs is connection.
What’s the best encouragement you’ve had in your writing?
For years, I was one of those people who said, “One day I’m going to write a novel.” I did courses on novel writing, bought books about writing and had ideas quietly brewing away in my head. What I didn’t do was actually write the book! Self-doubt, procrastination and an impressive ability to find reasons why now wasn’t the right time all played their part.
Eventually, I wrote Under Construction, and perhaps the greatest encouragement since then has been discovering that people I’ve never met are willing to spend hours of their lives with characters who once existed only inside my head.
Reader feedback still amazes me. When somebody tells me they laughed at something a character did, recognised themselves in a situation, were moved by a particular scene or simply didn’t want to say goodbye to the characters when the book ended, it reminds me why I write.
I particularly love hearing that my characters feel like real people. Mine tend to have flaws, peculiarities, complicated relationships and a habit of not doing precisely what I had planned for them. Rather like real people, really.
Perhaps that’s also the encouragement I’d give somebody who has been saying, “One day I’m going to write a book.” At some point, one day has to become today.
Finish the first draft. It sounds ridiculously simple, but I think it’s one of the most useful pieces of advice for writers. You can spend forever polishing the opening chapters, changing sentences, questioning whether the story is good enough and comparing what you’re writing with somebody else’s finished, professionally edited novel.
A first draft doesn’t have to be beautiful. It has to exist. Once you have a complete story, you have something you can work with. You can strengthen characters, move scenes, cut things that aren’t working, fix continuity problems and rewrite dreadful sentences. And there will be dreadful sentences. I’ve written plenty of them!
I’d also add: listen to your beta readers and editors, but don’t surrender your story to them. If several people stumble over the same thing, pay attention. They may not all suggest the right solution, but they’re probably telling you that something isn’t working. At the same time, you need to know what your story is trying to be. Not every suggestion belongs in it.
Are there any other points about writing you would like to add?
Research matters enormously to me, particularly when I’m writing about a world I haven’t personally lived in.
The Doctor’s Burden required a lot of medical research, and one thing I’ve learned is that research isn’t only about avoiding factual errors. Done properly, it changes the story. You discover things you wouldn’t have thought to invent, and those discoveries affect what your characters can realistically do, the decisions available to them and sometimes even the direction of the plot.
But there’s another side to research: most of it shouldn’t end up on the page. That can be painful! After spending hours learning something fascinating, there’s a terrible temptation to make sure the reader appreciates just how much work you’ve done. I’ve learned that the research has done its job when it makes the fictional world feel convincing without announcing its presence.
And when you’re writing about medicine, having knowledgeable people willing to tell you, “No, a doctor would absolutely not do that,” is invaluable!
I seem to be incapable of having only one writing project on the go!
My most recent release prior to this one is The Executive’s Dilemma, my contribution to the Our House on Heather Wynd series, set in the Scottish Highlands. Before that, I wrote The Runaway’s Redemption for the Our House on Sycamore Street series, set in southern England. One of the things I’ve loved about being part of the Our House series is that each one has taken me somewhere different. The Doctor’s Burden has been particularly special because this time the series has come to South Africa, and I’ve been able to write within a setting and culture that feel very much like home.
Once I’ve finished with Marissa and Cedarfontein, I’ll be returning to another old friend: Adine. She first appeared in my debut novel, Under Construction, and I’m now working on High Jinx, a cosy mystery set in the fictional KwaZulu-Natal coastal town of Port Sugarstone. It gives me the chance to revisit some characters I became very fond of while writing Under Construction, while introducing a mystery, some new faces and considerably more trouble than Adine would probably have chosen for herself.
Adine is very different from Marissa. She’s outspoken, independent, sometimes impulsive and has a remarkable ability to become involved in situations that would be considerably simpler if she just minded her own business. Fortunately for me, she rarely does.
I’m also working on something completely different: a pottery-inspired devotional book. Pottery is one of my hobbies, and there are so many parallels between working with clay and our Christian lives: being shaped, having things go wrong, starting again, patience, pressure, imperfections and learning that what we originally intended to make isn’t always what emerges from our hands. I’m enjoying exploring those ideas and connecting something I love doing with my faith.
And, inevitably, there are other stories hovering in the background waiting for their turn. Coming up with things to write has never been my problem. Finding enough hours to write all of them is another matter entirely.
Her website is currently undergoing a bit of a makeover, but it’s still very much open for visitors and has information about her books and what is in the process for new ones. Allyson Koekhoven Writes
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Allyson-Koekhoven/author/B0B7XPCDDN
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