But moving to the Australian National University to complete a PhD in wildlife health changed everything.

"I didn't know anyone, and my saviour was the mountains," she says. "Here in Canberra, that's what you see, the Brindabella Range, those beautiful purple mountains.

"I went up there hiking and mountain biking, and I would sit on the verandah of the slab hut in the Orroral Valley and just look out at the kangaroos grazing around me, at the scabby tops of the mountains, and think about what it must have been like for the people who lived there."

Place has always been important to Viggers, and it's where she starts and centres her novels.

In her 2008 debut, The Stranding, it was the wild beaches of the South Coast; for her second, The Lightkeeper's Wife, she drew inspiration from Antarctica and the rugged coastline of Bruny Island, off south-east Tasmania.

For her latest work, The Grass Castle, she returns to the Brindabella Range, the place that brought her much solace during those early years in a new city.

The Grass Castle is the story of two women - Abby, a young ecologist studying kangaroos, with a troubled past and sense of loneliness; and Daphne, an elderly woman still coming to terms with being forced from her home in the Brindabellas in the 1970s, when the government reclaimed land and established the national park after the tracking station shut down. It's a story of displacement and belonging and forgiveness across many levels.

The plight of the kangaroo also figures highly in the book. As part of her PhD work, Viggers spent time tracking the animals around the Canberra region, studying them, watching their interactions, much like the character Abby. When the ACT government culled 800 kangaroos at Googong Dam in 2004 and then 400 at the naval transmission site in Lawson in 2007, Viggers watched the conflicted parties "navigate the politics" of it all.

"It's hard not to be swayed by emotions, and I love kangaroos, but I'm also concerned for them, and the other critters and plants that live in a habitat. If there's too many of them they can cause damage.

"We've changed the landscape so much that we have to take responsibility. Is shooting an option? Is moving them to Namadgi, out of sight, out of mind - like [Greens MLA] Shane Rattenbury has suggested - a waste of time?

"Trying to find a solution is the hard thing."

Viggers says she was thinking through all the elements of the issue but wanted The Grass Castle to be a bigger story.

"A story has to have a heart, and the heart of this story came from the friendship between Abby and Daphne, and the disconnection and displacement they both felt, and the healing and forgiveness that occurs."

Viggers said she thoroughly enjoyed researching this book, a chance to study the history of a region she had come to love.

"After I've done my imaginings about what life would have been like, I tend to write first and then go back and research. One of the joys of it all was all the wonderful reading about the settlement history and the lives of the people in the area and the things they did."

She read tales of brumby runs through the Brindabellas, of cattle herders and early settlers and the harsh conditions they endured, of the indigenous people, moth hunters who carved paths through the mountains.

She also found inspiration in the work of acclaimed Australian author Miles Franklin, who grew up in the Brindabella Valley, and Gwen Meredith, who wrote much of the long-running Blue Hills radio series in a cottage at Koorabri in the valley during the 1950s.

Viggers had always wanted to be a journalist, "but I had an uncle who told me journalists weren't very nice people and all my dreams collapsed'', she says.

"So I did my vet degree and started working, but I kept writing - journals, poetry, but nothing ever published.

"But I was getting close to 40 and we weren't managing to have two scientists in one family with two children [Viggers' husband, David, is an ecologist at the ANU], and David said he would support me if I worked part time as a vet to pay the food bills and keep me in touch with reality."

The Grass Castle touched a chord for this reader. It's a story that will surely captivate readers in the Bush Capital, a story that will return to you time and time again. You'll be driving down the Tuggeranong Parkway, glance out over to the west and see those purple mountains, and be touched by the meaning of it all.

Although Viggers, like many people who move to Canberra, first found it hard to settle here, it's a place that is hard not to call home.