And of course, she admits, she is using a similar isolated setting on a pristine lake as the location of her third novel, which she is currently at work on. Milner and her husband now live north of Williams Lake, off the grid in an eco friendly timber frame home. It is no secret that the town of Rossland where she resided for seven years, was the prototype for the border town of Atwood in AFTER RIVER, and in her new novel, THE PROMISE OF RAIN, her childhood home in a Fraserview subdivision of 'wartime houses' served as the backdrop for the Vancouver scenes.

Milner makes no apologies for using the British Columbia locations where she has lived as inspiration for the settings of her novels. It has been translated into six different languages, and made into an audio book. Her debut novel AFTER RIVER, was picked out of the slush pile at Gregory & Co Agency, and subsequently sold and published in twelve countries. Her creative non-fiction articles have been published in local periodicals, Reader's Digest, and the anthology Brothers, Borders and Babylon. It wasn't until after she had raised four children and retired from a 25 year career in Real Estate that she pursued her secret passion for writing. In 1972 she settled in the central interior of British Columbia and has resided there since. As a young woman she relocated to a small town in the West Kootenays where she married and started a family. Donna Jonas Milner, who has been referred to as the, 'Oh, so Canadian author,' was born in Victoria British Columbia and grew up in South Vancouver.

After river by donna milner