In a detention centre shadowed by corruption and silence, Seka shines a light on the abuses buried behind locked gates…
Seka Torlak, an investigative journalist, is at an Australian immigration detention centre in 2001, to write a feel-good piece about a model asylum seeker. Instead, she uncovers the story of Afsana — a young Hazara detainee whose quiet defiance made her a thorn in the side of the authorities. The official story is Afsana voluntarily “returned” home, but the paperwork doesn’t add up. Determined to find the truth, she has herself locked inside as a refugee, undercover among the very people she has come to save. Behind the wire, Seka finds a system designed to break asylum seekers until they surrender their bid for freedom. In a place shadowed by corruption and silence, shining a light on the abuses behind locked gates can get you silenced for good. Will Seka win her freedom and her story, or will she become another silent victim of corruption? Coming 1 November 2026 Please be aware that trigger warnings could contain spoilers and so I have included them on my themes page For publicity information please view Whispers Behind the Wire Media Kit below Bonus content-only available to newsletter subscribers
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Click on the cover to find out about the prequel in the Seka Torlak Series.
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Whispers Behind the Wire Tropes
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Media Kit
Whispers Behind the Wire Media Kit
Title: Whispers Behind the Wire
Pub date: 1 November 2026
ISBN Print: 9781922871701
ISBN Ebook: 9781922871695
BUY LINKS:
Amazon (US): https://www.amazon.com/Whispers-Behind-Wire-Torlak-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0H4HZ348K/
Amazon (AUS): https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0H4HZ348K
Universal (International Amazon ebook & Wide Print): https://www.amrapajalic.com/whispers.html
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253634227-whispers-behind-the-wire
Prices (in USD):
Print: $19.99
E-Book: $3.99
Length: 240 Pages
Prices: (in AUD)
Print: $24.99
E-book: $4.99
Rating: Historical Mystery
Hashtags: #WhispersBehindtheWire #SekaTorlakSeries #AmraPajalic #AustralianCrimeFiction #HistoricalCrime #MysteryThriller #MissingPersonMystery #InvestigativeJournalist
Tagline: In a detention centre shadowed by corruption and silence, Seka shines a light on the abuses buried behind locked gates…
Short: Melbourne 2001, when an asylum seeker has voluntarily “returned” home, Seka has herself locked inside a detention centre as a refugee because the paperwork doesn’t add up.
Medium tagline: Melbourne 2000, when an asylum seeker has voluntarily “returned” home, Seka has herself locked inside a detention centre as a refugee because the paperwork doesn’t add up. Will Seka win her freedom and her story, or will she become another silent victim of corruption?
Blurb:
In a detention centre shadowed by corruption and silence, Seka shines a light on the abuses buried behind locked gates…
Seka Torlak, an investigative journalist, is at an Australian immigration detention centre in 2001, to write a feel-good piece about a model asylum seeker. Instead, she uncovers the story of Afsana — a young Hazara detainee whose quiet defiance made her a thorn in the side of the authorities. The official story is Afsana voluntarily “returned” home, but the paperwork doesn’t add up.
Determined to find the truth, she has herself locked inside as a refugee, undercover among the very people she has come to save. Behind the wire, Seka finds a system designed to break asylum seekers until they surrender their bid for freedom. In a place shadowed by corruption and silence, shining a light on the abuses behind locked gates can get you silenced for good. Will Seka win her freedom and her story, or will she become another silent victim of corruption?
Lead In Post
New Crime Novel Puts Australia’s Immigration Detention System on Trial — And Draws on the Real Cases That Exposed It
The novel’s central premise — a citizen swallowed by the detention system under a stranger’s name, and a vulnerable Australian woman who disappears inside it entirely—is drawn directly from two real cases that forced a national reckoning.
In 2005, the Palmer Inquiry revealed that Cornelia Rau, a German-Australian resident who had lived in the country since childhood, spent ten months in unlawful immigration detention—six months in a Brisbane women’s prison and four more at the Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia—after a mental health crisis led authorities to mistake her for an unlawful non-citizen. Her family had already reported her missing to police, but the two systems never spoke to each other. She was identified only after a newspaper report on an unknown woman held at Baxter reached people who recognised her.
In a related case examined by the same inquiry, Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon—recovering from a serious accident and a mental health crisis of her own—was wrongfully deported to the Philippines in 2001. She spent four years in a hospice run by Catholic nuns before a priest recognised her from a news report and reunited her with her family. Both women were later awarded multi-million-dollar compensation; both cases prompted formal government apologies and reforms to detention and identification procedures.
“I read about Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon and I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily ‘unlawful non-citizen’ swallowed two Australian women whole, and how long it took anyone in the system to notice they were gone,” said Pajalić. “I wanted to write a thriller about that—not the policy debate, the actual machinery: the paperwork, the misspelled name, the doctor who writes ‘no evidence of acute risk’ and moves on. Seka gets locked up on purpose, but everyone else in that book is there because the system stopped being able to tell them apart from a filing error.”
Pajalić, whose family and husband arrived in Australia as refugees after the war in Bosnia, has said the series lets her write the kind of morally complex, unapologetic heroine she couldn’t find on the page as a young reader—a Muslim refugee protagonist entitled to anger, not just gratitude.
Excerpt
2001
I had received permission to enter the detention centre and interview Farid under the pretext of writing a glowing newspaper article about his story—the good asylum seeker, the one the government could put a face to and point at.
“How long have you been in the detention centre?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Two years.”
They were the unfortunate ones who arrived not long after the Howard government’s return to office in the ‘98 election, when border protection had become the government’s favourite political football, asylum seekers painted as tough-on-crime theatre—desperate people recast as a threat to law and order and jobs.
“And before that? Your family, back home?”
His hand went to the scar without his permission this time, thumb tracing its length. “My cousin. With a knife his own father gave him, for his sixteenth birthday, so he could prove himself a man.” He said it the way you’d read out an address, flat and precise, precision the only thing holding the memory at arm’s length. “I was Hazara. He was not. That was the whole of it.”
He didn’t offer anything more, and I didn’t ask him to. Some silences were their own kind of answer.
“How are the conditions for the other asylum seekers?” I pressed on.
Farid’s jaw tightened. His gaze flicked to the guard nearest the door—not the department navy I’d expected, but a private security patch stitched over the breast pocket, a company crest where a coat of arms should have been. A long silence pressed down around us, broken only by the distant hum of air-conditioning. At last he whispered, “Good.”
It was exactly the answer I had feared.
“We’ve heard reports of terrible conditions,” I whispered, lowering my voice. “That some detainees are beaten, that food rations are severely limited.” I glanced sideways at the guard; his expression stayed unreadable, but his thumb had drifted to hook loose over the radio on his belt.
Farid’s eyes filled with urgency, as if he weighed every word before releasing it. He swallowed. “They ... restrain us. They punish us. They treat us like criminals.”
Before I could respond, something at the edge of my vision shifted. I turned slowly. A woman stood just beyond the harsh circle of light, her figure ethereal against the drab walls. She wore a flowing tunic of deep emerald, the fabric whispering at her ankles, and loose linen pants tucked into simple sandals. A sheer scarf, also green, draped over her head and loosely across her face, revealing only her dark brown eyes that glowed with ancient sorrow. Her olive skin looked drawn and pale, with faint veins visible beneath.
“Can I help you?” I asked, startled by her sudden presence.
She didn’t open her mouth, not exactly, but the words arrived anyway, pressed into the place behind my eyes where thought happens before language catches up to it: Nasira. Find me. Family. Three fragments, or the ghosts of words, that my own mind arranged into a sentence because it needed one.
I opened my mouth, pen poised. “Of course—Nasira. Where is your family?”
An image answered, not words: the high cement wall behind me, and beyond it, more wall, more wire. I understood it the way you understand a smell before you can name it.
I turned to look, my heart pounding. When I glanced back, she had vanished.
I turned to look at Farid. His eyes were wide, stunned. “How do you know Nasira?” he demanded, voice hushed.
It hit me then: I hadn’t been speaking to Nasira at all, but to her ghost. “She wants me to find her family.”
Farid’s lips trembled. “They’re here. Her mother and two sisters.”
I pressed on, breath catching. “What happened to her?”
He lowered his gaze. “She returned home. Nasira’s rebellion would have condemned her family to deportation, so she volunteered to leave.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“One month.”
He watched me anxiously, weighing how much of this he could afford to say aloud. “She would not be quiet.” His gaze cut to the guard by the door. “When they hit people, she stood between them. Said she was writing it all down, for the commission.”
“The guards let her?” I asked, pen moving, careful to keep my voice as low as his.
“At first they laughed at her. Then they didn’t.”
The guard shifted his weight, boots scraping concrete, and Farid’s mouth shut like a door. I waited through a silence that stretched too long to be comfortable.
“The hunger strike,” he said finally, barely a breath. “She led it.”
“And after?”
He shook his head, and I understood I would get no further today—not the back room, not what they’d done to make her stop, not what “voluntarily” had come to mean inside these walls.
“They didn’t even let her say goodbye,” Farid whispered. “They just collected her things, and she was gone.”
Author Bio:
Amra Pajalic is an award-winning Australian author, educator, and indie publisher known for crafting compelling stories that blend heart, humour, and heritage. Her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and resilience, often drawing from her Bosnian background.
She won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature's Civic Choice Award for her debut novel The Good Daughter, re-released as Sabiha's Dilemma (Pishukin Press, 2022). The anthology she co-edited, Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Children's Book Council of the year awards and her memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me (Transit Lounge, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award.
She is the author of the Sassy Saints series and the Seka Torlak historical-mystery series, beginning with Time Kneels Between Mountains, and the second book Ghosts Among the Gumtrees, and companion essay collection that examine the legacy of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide
When she's not writing, Amra is podcasting on Amra’s Armchair Anecdotes, mentoring emerging writers, and delivering workshops across Australia on self-publishing, writing craft, and creative resilience.
Social media handles
Website: http://www.amrapajalic.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amrapajalicauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmraPajalic
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amrapajalic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmraPajalicAuthor/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/amra-pajalic
Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3310015.Amra_Pajalic
Author Central: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B005C8AIDY
Newsletter sign up (receive a FREE ebook copy of bonus story Afsana’s Voyage and essay about the detention centres in Australia) https://www.amrapajalic.com/my-newsletter.html
Title: Whispers Behind the Wire
Pub date: 1 November 2026
ISBN Print: 9781922871701
ISBN Ebook: 9781922871695
BUY LINKS:
Amazon (US): https://www.amazon.com/Whispers-Behind-Wire-Torlak-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0H4HZ348K/
Amazon (AUS): https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0H4HZ348K
Universal (International Amazon ebook & Wide Print): https://www.amrapajalic.com/whispers.html
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253634227-whispers-behind-the-wire
Prices (in USD):
Print: $19.99
E-Book: $3.99
Length: 240 Pages
Prices: (in AUD)
Print: $24.99
E-book: $4.99
Rating: Historical Mystery
Hashtags: #WhispersBehindtheWire #SekaTorlakSeries #AmraPajalic #AustralianCrimeFiction #HistoricalCrime #MysteryThriller #MissingPersonMystery #InvestigativeJournalist
Tagline: In a detention centre shadowed by corruption and silence, Seka shines a light on the abuses buried behind locked gates…
Short: Melbourne 2001, when an asylum seeker has voluntarily “returned” home, Seka has herself locked inside a detention centre as a refugee because the paperwork doesn’t add up.
Medium tagline: Melbourne 2000, when an asylum seeker has voluntarily “returned” home, Seka has herself locked inside a detention centre as a refugee because the paperwork doesn’t add up. Will Seka win her freedom and her story, or will she become another silent victim of corruption?
Blurb:
In a detention centre shadowed by corruption and silence, Seka shines a light on the abuses buried behind locked gates…
Seka Torlak, an investigative journalist, is at an Australian immigration detention centre in 2001, to write a feel-good piece about a model asylum seeker. Instead, she uncovers the story of Afsana — a young Hazara detainee whose quiet defiance made her a thorn in the side of the authorities. The official story is Afsana voluntarily “returned” home, but the paperwork doesn’t add up.
Determined to find the truth, she has herself locked inside as a refugee, undercover among the very people she has come to save. Behind the wire, Seka finds a system designed to break asylum seekers until they surrender their bid for freedom. In a place shadowed by corruption and silence, shining a light on the abuses behind locked gates can get you silenced for good. Will Seka win her freedom and her story, or will she become another silent victim of corruption?
Lead In Post
New Crime Novel Puts Australia’s Immigration Detention System on Trial — And Draws on the Real Cases That Exposed It
The novel’s central premise — a citizen swallowed by the detention system under a stranger’s name, and a vulnerable Australian woman who disappears inside it entirely—is drawn directly from two real cases that forced a national reckoning.
In 2005, the Palmer Inquiry revealed that Cornelia Rau, a German-Australian resident who had lived in the country since childhood, spent ten months in unlawful immigration detention—six months in a Brisbane women’s prison and four more at the Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia—after a mental health crisis led authorities to mistake her for an unlawful non-citizen. Her family had already reported her missing to police, but the two systems never spoke to each other. She was identified only after a newspaper report on an unknown woman held at Baxter reached people who recognised her.
In a related case examined by the same inquiry, Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon—recovering from a serious accident and a mental health crisis of her own—was wrongfully deported to the Philippines in 2001. She spent four years in a hospice run by Catholic nuns before a priest recognised her from a news report and reunited her with her family. Both women were later awarded multi-million-dollar compensation; both cases prompted formal government apologies and reforms to detention and identification procedures.
“I read about Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon and I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily ‘unlawful non-citizen’ swallowed two Australian women whole, and how long it took anyone in the system to notice they were gone,” said Pajalić. “I wanted to write a thriller about that—not the policy debate, the actual machinery: the paperwork, the misspelled name, the doctor who writes ‘no evidence of acute risk’ and moves on. Seka gets locked up on purpose, but everyone else in that book is there because the system stopped being able to tell them apart from a filing error.”
Pajalić, whose family and husband arrived in Australia as refugees after the war in Bosnia, has said the series lets her write the kind of morally complex, unapologetic heroine she couldn’t find on the page as a young reader—a Muslim refugee protagonist entitled to anger, not just gratitude.
Excerpt
2001
I had received permission to enter the detention centre and interview Farid under the pretext of writing a glowing newspaper article about his story—the good asylum seeker, the one the government could put a face to and point at.
“How long have you been in the detention centre?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Two years.”
They were the unfortunate ones who arrived not long after the Howard government’s return to office in the ‘98 election, when border protection had become the government’s favourite political football, asylum seekers painted as tough-on-crime theatre—desperate people recast as a threat to law and order and jobs.
“And before that? Your family, back home?”
His hand went to the scar without his permission this time, thumb tracing its length. “My cousin. With a knife his own father gave him, for his sixteenth birthday, so he could prove himself a man.” He said it the way you’d read out an address, flat and precise, precision the only thing holding the memory at arm’s length. “I was Hazara. He was not. That was the whole of it.”
He didn’t offer anything more, and I didn’t ask him to. Some silences were their own kind of answer.
“How are the conditions for the other asylum seekers?” I pressed on.
Farid’s jaw tightened. His gaze flicked to the guard nearest the door—not the department navy I’d expected, but a private security patch stitched over the breast pocket, a company crest where a coat of arms should have been. A long silence pressed down around us, broken only by the distant hum of air-conditioning. At last he whispered, “Good.”
It was exactly the answer I had feared.
“We’ve heard reports of terrible conditions,” I whispered, lowering my voice. “That some detainees are beaten, that food rations are severely limited.” I glanced sideways at the guard; his expression stayed unreadable, but his thumb had drifted to hook loose over the radio on his belt.
Farid’s eyes filled with urgency, as if he weighed every word before releasing it. He swallowed. “They ... restrain us. They punish us. They treat us like criminals.”
Before I could respond, something at the edge of my vision shifted. I turned slowly. A woman stood just beyond the harsh circle of light, her figure ethereal against the drab walls. She wore a flowing tunic of deep emerald, the fabric whispering at her ankles, and loose linen pants tucked into simple sandals. A sheer scarf, also green, draped over her head and loosely across her face, revealing only her dark brown eyes that glowed with ancient sorrow. Her olive skin looked drawn and pale, with faint veins visible beneath.
“Can I help you?” I asked, startled by her sudden presence.
She didn’t open her mouth, not exactly, but the words arrived anyway, pressed into the place behind my eyes where thought happens before language catches up to it: Nasira. Find me. Family. Three fragments, or the ghosts of words, that my own mind arranged into a sentence because it needed one.
I opened my mouth, pen poised. “Of course—Nasira. Where is your family?”
An image answered, not words: the high cement wall behind me, and beyond it, more wall, more wire. I understood it the way you understand a smell before you can name it.
I turned to look, my heart pounding. When I glanced back, she had vanished.
I turned to look at Farid. His eyes were wide, stunned. “How do you know Nasira?” he demanded, voice hushed.
It hit me then: I hadn’t been speaking to Nasira at all, but to her ghost. “She wants me to find her family.”
Farid’s lips trembled. “They’re here. Her mother and two sisters.”
I pressed on, breath catching. “What happened to her?”
He lowered his gaze. “She returned home. Nasira’s rebellion would have condemned her family to deportation, so she volunteered to leave.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“One month.”
He watched me anxiously, weighing how much of this he could afford to say aloud. “She would not be quiet.” His gaze cut to the guard by the door. “When they hit people, she stood between them. Said she was writing it all down, for the commission.”
“The guards let her?” I asked, pen moving, careful to keep my voice as low as his.
“At first they laughed at her. Then they didn’t.”
The guard shifted his weight, boots scraping concrete, and Farid’s mouth shut like a door. I waited through a silence that stretched too long to be comfortable.
“The hunger strike,” he said finally, barely a breath. “She led it.”
“And after?”
He shook his head, and I understood I would get no further today—not the back room, not what they’d done to make her stop, not what “voluntarily” had come to mean inside these walls.
“They didn’t even let her say goodbye,” Farid whispered. “They just collected her things, and she was gone.”
Author Bio:
Amra Pajalic is an award-winning Australian author, educator, and indie publisher known for crafting compelling stories that blend heart, humour, and heritage. Her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and resilience, often drawing from her Bosnian background.
She won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature's Civic Choice Award for her debut novel The Good Daughter, re-released as Sabiha's Dilemma (Pishukin Press, 2022). The anthology she co-edited, Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Children's Book Council of the year awards and her memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me (Transit Lounge, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award.
She is the author of the Sassy Saints series and the Seka Torlak historical-mystery series, beginning with Time Kneels Between Mountains, and the second book Ghosts Among the Gumtrees, and companion essay collection that examine the legacy of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide
When she's not writing, Amra is podcasting on Amra’s Armchair Anecdotes, mentoring emerging writers, and delivering workshops across Australia on self-publishing, writing craft, and creative resilience.
Social media handles
Website: http://www.amrapajalic.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amrapajalicauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmraPajalic
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amrapajalic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmraPajalicAuthor/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/amra-pajalic
Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3310015.Amra_Pajalic
Author Central: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B005C8AIDY
Newsletter sign up (receive a FREE ebook copy of bonus story Afsana’s Voyage and essay about the detention centres in Australia) https://www.amrapajalic.com/my-newsletter.html
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