After winning the 2013 Nita B. Kibble Literary award for women's life writing with her debut novel The Beloved, as well as being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, she agrees there might be some pressure on her new book Last Day in the Dynamite Factory.

"But I got to the point with my writing about five years ago, I suppose, where I thought, 'Am I doing this because I want to be published or because I'm enjoying it and it's what I want to do with my life?'

"And I decided I'm doing it because I want to do it. I let myself off the hook and said 'write what you want to write and enjoy it and if someone wants to publish it that's wonderful and if they don't too bad'."

Mind you, she's seemingly always written to the beat of her own drum. The Beloved took 15 years to write and she started on Dynamite about 18 months afterwards, working on both novels simultaneously.

"Neither of them were written full bore," she says, "Sometimes it would be six months before I looked at one or the other and I didn't have a clear picture of where Dynamite was headed.

"But I've discovered that even though there's this huge yearning to get a handle on what you're writing, if you can bear to let it be a mess and nothing concrete, if you can live with that, what usually happens, after a couple of weeks or a few months, something crystallises and it's worth the wait."

Faulkner says Dynamite had three incarnations. Initially it was a comedy - "I threw that in the trash fairly quickly" - and then a much more "serious" work about an accountant named Sam - "but that crashed into a wall and wouldn't go any further" and then as she was finishing The Beloved, a very small bit player in that book caught her eye.

"He was a young version of the man I've got in Dynamite; Sam the accountant became Chris the architect, and away it went after that."

And so Chris is the protagonist of Dynamite, a man living a good life, a devoted family, a well-respected career as a conservation architect, but when he finds out the truth about his birth father his world unravels and he discovers that sometimes the truth is better not told.

In part, the book is inspired by Faulkner's aunt, Alison Svensson, who had been adopted.

"And when she died we found her adoption papers and there was this little section in the corner that said 'Paid for' and I was amazed by the idea of paying for a child."

Svensson, and her husband Albert, worked in a munitions factory in Victoria shortly after the end of World War Two and a crucial turn in Dynamite takes place in this setting.

"I remember about 25 years ago they used to tell me stories about their time there and I didn't think much of it then, to be honest," Faulkner says. "I'm not sure how it all got intertwined here but it seemed like a good idea at the time and it's a very important part of history that needs to be investigated."

She says it was extremely frustrating trying to research what it was like in the dynamite factories; just how dangerous it was, what the conditions were like.

"I'm hoping that perhaps someone else will come along, go further with the research and find out what really happened."

The research Chris does in the book mirrors the research that Faulkner did in the State Library of Victoria but most of the background relied on first-hand accounts and excerpts from technical reports.

"I kept wondering what records had been erased and why and by who."

Last Day in the Dynamite Factory, by Annah Faulkner. Picador. $32.99.