Tales of Tahiti from a femme fatale

Talking to Celestine Hitiura Vaite is like getting lost in one of her best-selling novels. Vibrant, spontaneous and frank in the extreme, Vaite cannot hold a conversation without anchoring it in a rich smattering of family stories, old Tahitian sayings, French phrases and womanly advice.

This may explain how the Tahiti-born, Australia-based author has become an international best-selling writer inside six years.

The illegitimate daughter of a Tahitian cleaner and a French naval officer, Vaite is the real deal, a manifestation of the strong, outspoken Tahitian women she writes of in her novels Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare. Her greeting is a mix of Tahitian French and Australian English. She confesses to homesickness, a hankering for the cadences of French, and a headache 'that goes boom-boom' - all in one sentence.

'I love French and write all my dialogue in French, and I highly recommend it for wooing,' she said. 'I miss it because I live in this tiny little town on the New South Wales coast where it's all: 'How ya goin', mate'.'

Homesickness and a longing for French as it is spoken in Tahiti was what powered her novels to begin with, said Vaite, who left her beloved Tahiti for Australia after falling in love with a surfer at the age of 15.

She married at 18 and became a mother at 19. In a moment of nostalgia, in her 30s, when she was what she calls a 'surfing widow', she began writing short stories about a strong Tahitian woman called Matarena Mahi, based on the writer's mother, a single parent of four who earned a living as a cleaner. In one story, Matarena battles with the electricity man who has come to disconnect the power.