"It's one of the books I'm going to be talking about. It's the history of a house."
The first book in the series, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city came out in 2015 and was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand book awards.
The new book is a fictional twin to the first, a work of non-fiction. Both are centred around the earthquake and rebuild of Christchurch.
Farrell had already published a number of novels before the quake, beginning with The Skinny Louie Book, for which she won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award.
She wrote plays, poetry and short fiction for a number of years before her first novel was published, for which she received numerous awards.
The writer had not been to Whanganui in a "long time", she said, since she lived in Palmerston North from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
She moved to Dunedin just a month ago to be nearer her daughter, but lived in Christchurch during the earthquake of 2011 and then rural Canterbury.
"We've still got a house in Banks Peninsula."
Farrell has written three earthquake-themed non-fiction books, beginning with The Broken Book, a travel story broken up by 21 poems on the 2011 earthquake.
For her next work, The Quake Year, she interviewed Christchurch residents about the February 2011 quake and particularly its aftermath.
A volume of poetry is probably next her agenda, she said.
"I've got a lot of unpublished work."
For the festival, Farrell would be talking to Mary-Ann Ewing about switching between literary forms and her post-quake books.
The talk, entitled Moving Between Forms, takes place on Saturday, October 7 at the War Memorial Centre.
A panel discussion also featuring Fiona Farrell - Poetry and Place - is at 10am on Sunday, October 8.
Book at Royal Wanganui Opera House: royaloperahouse.co.nz
