The Place Between
Saturday, 26 September 2020
Sarah used to know who she was—a doctor, a wife, a mother—but as she prepares for the birth of her second child, she feels set adrift from the life she...
Wolfred
Saturday, 26 September 2020
A mesmerising new story about Wolfred, an endearing elevator operator, from the beloved author of the best-selling ‘Very Cranky Bear’ books. Fancy Pants Tower is the biggest, shiniest building in...
Dog (Shaun Tan, A&U)
Wednesday, 23 September 2020
This is Shaun Tan doing what he does best. Carrying an elegant tension between joy and sadness, Dog left me in a puddle of emotion. The prose poetry traces the...
We Are Wolves (Katrina Nannestad, ABC Books)
Wednesday, 23 September 2020
In We Are Wolves, middle-grade author Katrina Nannestad, creator of the ‘Olive of Groves’ and ‘Girl, the Dog and the Writer’ series, moves confidently into more sombre territory with the...
Little Jiang (Shirley Marr, illus by Katy Jiang, Fremantle Press)
Wednesday, 2 September 2020
Born under a confluence of inauspicious signs and hitherto haunted by all manner of hungry ghosts, it’s difficult for Mei to dismiss her aunt’s firmly held belief that she is...
Infinite Splendours (Sofie Laguna, A&U)
Wednesday, 2 September 2020
Miles Franklin–winner Sofie Laguna’s fourth novel tells the story of Lawrence, a boy from a small western Victorian town near the Southern Grampians mountain range. Lawrence has a special, spiritual...
Bindi (Kirli Saunders, illus by Dub Leffler, Magabala)
Wednesday, 5 August 2020
Multi–award winning author and poet Kirli Saunders turns her talent to junior fiction with this wonderfully engaging verse novel, which won the inaugural WA Premier’s Daisy Utemorrah Award. Eleven-year-old Bindi...
Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness (Kylie Maslen, Text)
Wednesday, 22 July 2020
Imagine living with an invisible illness. For 20 years, Kylie Maslen has been doing just that: her chronic pain and bipolar II (the latter undiagnosed until she was 35) have...
Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future (Ketan Joshi, NewSouth)
Wednesday, 15 July 2020
In Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future, renewable energy industry insider Ketan Joshi gives a teeth-gnashing account of Australia's interminable climate debates. Working as a data analyst and communicator at Infigen...
Fly on the Wall (Remy Lai, Walker)
Wednesday, 8 July 2020
When Henry Khoo isn’t trolling his school as anonymous cartoonist ‘Fly on the Wall’, he is being babied at home by an overprotective family. To correct this, Henry devises a...
The Mother Fault (Kate Mildenhall, S&S)
Wednesday, 1 July 2020
This gripping and thoughtful novel offers a spine-tingling vision of a future Australia—eerie in its potential realism—in which citizens’ movements are tracked and climate change has decimated the country, flooding...
Revenge: Murder in Three Parts (S L Lim, Transit Lounge)
Wednesday, 17 June 2020
S L Lim’s riveting sophomore novel opens with a disturbing scene of sibling abuse. Yannie, a shy and book-loving teenage girl, lives in the shadow of her brother Shan, who...
Found (Bruce Pascoe, illus by Charmaine Ledden-Lewis, Magabala)
Thursday, 11 June 2020
The first foray into picture books for Bruce Pascoe (author of the wildly successful Dark Emu) is deceptively straightforward: a frightening separation (don’t worry, there’s a happy ending) between a...
The Lost Soul Atlas (Zana Fraillon, Lothian)
Thursday, 28 May 2020
The Lost Soul Atlas marks Zana Fraillon’s triumphant return to middle-grade after a stint writing YA and picture books, with Fraillon once again tackling significant social issues in this exploration...
The Hunted (Gabriel Bergmoser, HarperCollins)
Sunday, 24 May 2020
On a lonely highway in outback Australia sits a solitary service station run by the equally solitary Frank, whose teenage granddaughter has been sent to stay with him for some...
The End of the World is Bigger Than Love (Davina Bell, Text)
Thursday, 2 April 2020
Davina Bell’s first young adult novel is unlike anything else written for the target audience. This becomes clear almost immediately upon beginning the book, when the identical twin protagonists, Summer...
The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system (Patrick Mullins, Scribe)
Thursday, 26 March 2020
Starting even before Federation and lasting until the early 1970s, the Australian government controlled what Australians could read. Yet today, as Patrick Mullins recounts in this scintillating account of the rise and fall of Australian...
Father of the Lost Boys (Yuot A Alaak, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 26 March 2020
This shocking story should be better known: the attempt of more than 20,000 orphaned boys and thousands more refugee followers to survive amid the terrifying atrocities of the Second Sudanse...
The History of Mischief
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Following the death of their parents, Jessie and Kay move to an abandoned house where one night they discover The History of Mischief hidden beneath the floor: it is a...
Where is Claris in Paris!
Thursday, 19 March 2020
A brand-new search-and-find series starring Claris, the chicest mouse in Paris! With a quarter of a million Claris books in print, readers can’t get enough of this stylish little mouse!...
Mama Ocean
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Mama Ocean had eyes that sparkled, like sunlight on the sea, and tresses which tumbled and trailed through the tides. But something is troubling Mama Ocean. Who will help her?...
Magical middle-grade novel wins major prize
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Jessica Townsend’s 2017 debut children’s novel Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow (Hachette Australia)—the first in a magical series for younger readers—has won the overall award at the biennial Adelaide...
The Friendly Games
Thursday, 19 March 2020
In 1956 Melbourne hosted the Summer Olympic Games. Student John Wing was so proud of his country, one of the friendliest places on earth. But when world tensions dominated the...
Anisa’s Alphabet
Thursday, 19 March 2020
For many refugees, the alphabet represents the start of a new language and a new future, but Anisa’s Alphabet is different. A poignant and highly imaginative telling of one girl’s...
Internationally published refugee memoir to be adapted for film
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Behrouz Boochani’s multi-award-winning memoir No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (trans by Omid Tofighian, Picador)—an account of the Iranian refugee’s incarceration on Manus Island by the Australian...
Lead children’s titles from Australian publishers & agents
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Prior to the cancellation of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Think Australian spoke with a number of Australian publishers and literary agents who were scheduled to attend the fair. Here...
Educational picture books on ‘microbial worlds’ sold to Korea, China
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Children’s/YA sales Language rights to four titles in the ‘Small Friends Books’ series of educational picture books—co-published by art–science collaborative and micro-publisher Scale Free Network (SFN) and CSIRO Publishing—have been...
Showcasing Australian children’s books following cancelled Bologna fair
Thursday, 19 March 2020
With the Bologna Children’s Book Fair cancelled in the wake of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the focus for publishers will inevitably shift to online rights-selling and networking opportunities. After all,...
‘The 117-Storey Treehouse’ tops 2019 Australian children’s chart
Thursday, 19 March 2020
The 117-Storey Treehouse, the ninth book in Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s internationally published junior fiction series, was the bestselling Australian children’s book in 2019. It managed to hold off...
Affirm acquires new picture book from Godwin, Lester
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Children’s/YA acquisitions Affirm Press has acquired the rights to Sing Me the Summer (November), a new picture book from bestselling children’s book creators Jane Godwin and Alison Lester (pictured), which...
