Sixteen-year-old Susan Bennett faces a world of confusion between her difficult parents and overweight, non-speaking brother, but when her sibling finally speaks in order to confess that his plan is to save the world, Susan realizes that the time has come to confront her parents.
On the fifth anniversary of his sister’s death, nineteen-year-old Jonny Dart is still troubled by guilt and an imperfect memory of the accident that took hr life. He goes searching for the only other witness to the fatal event, his sister’s best friend. But instead of finding the answers he’s looking for, he finds Sophie — a gentle old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, who teaches him about remembering and about loss.
A stunningly original voice in young adult fiction. Harper Flute believes that her younger brother Tin, with his uncanny ability to dig, was born to burrow. While their family struggles to survive in a desolate landscape during the Great Depression, the silent and elusive little Tin – “born on a Thursday and so fated to his wanderings” – begins to escape underground, tunneling beneath their tiny shanty. As time passes and fate deals the family an especially cruel hand, Harper’s parents withdraw emotionally, and her siblings bravely try to fill the void, while Tin becomes a wild thing, leaving them further and further behind. With exquisite prose, richly drawn characters, and a touch of magical realism, Sonya Hartnett tells a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story through the clear eyes of an observant child. It’s a loving and unsentimental portrait of family loyalty in the face of poverty and heartbreak, entwined with a surreal vision of the enigmatic Tin – disappearing into a mysterious labyrinth that reaches unimaginably far, yet remains hauntingly near.
In her brilliant but argumentative family, Hero is different, because she doesn’t speak. Instead, she prefers the silence and solitude she finds climbing the trees high above her neighbors stately old house. But everything changes when Hero starts to do odd jobs for the neighbor — and discovers a shocking secret high up in the tower of the house. “Mahy is a writer who just keeps getting better with every book.”– Kirkus Reviews, pointer review “Mahys exceptional imagination and storytelling prowess will make it difficult for readers to leave this book behind themhers is a tale with staying power.”– Publishers Weekly, starred review New Zealand author Margaret Mahy won the Carnegie Medal for The Changeover and The Haunting. Her most recent novel for Viking is Tingleberries, Tuckertubs, and Telephones.
In 1946, in the northern Australian fishing town of Broome, Hart Penrose remembers. He remembers his parents his silent English mother and bluff Australian father. He remembers the storm that tore open is leg, and his sister Alice, whose exuberance and strength brought him out of despair. He remembers the racism and hatred that roiled Broome in the days before WW2, the unwarranted suspicions of the native Japanese that pulled the town apart. Most of all, he remembers Misty Sennosuke, the warm and beautiful girl next door, the girl he loved, the one he betrayed.
It is seventeen-year-old Ellis’s first night at home after graduating from prep school. By chance he bumps into Jackie Cattle, whom he remembers from grade school. Jackie is a couple of years older than Ellis, a drifter, disreputable, yet with an odd charm and a disarming wit. For the next twenty-four hours, Ellis enters an extraordinary world on the fringe of society that he never knew existed. Jackie introduces him to life at the Land-of-Smiles, a dilapidated motel where nightly a strange collection of local characters gather to drink and talk. Two attractive sisters, Ursa and Leona, the elder studying to be a lawyer, live there. Leona loves and takes care of a baby whose mother stops in only once in a while. Then the baby disappears, and Ellis is thrust into a wild, sometimes almost violent search for the child. This is a stunning novel that grips the reader as it sweeps to its conclusion. Rich characterization, breathtaking action, and an ultimately heartwarming solution distinguish this latest triumph of Margaret Mahy.
Although he is afraid of Andrew Aldie, twelve-year-old Chris Cooper agrees to help his friend Finn Lochlan look for a way to stop Andrew’s father from opening a gravel pit near their Scottish village.
In a magical place called the Congo, in the beautiful forests and jungles of Virunga National Park, lives a young female mountain gorilla named Miza. She was just like any other baby gorilla, riding on her mother’s back, playing, taking naps. Then, one day, when Miza and her mother were out searching for food, Miza’s mother disappeared, leaving her baby alone and frightened. Miza’s father, a fierce silverback named Kabirizi and the leader of Virunga’s largest family of mountain gorillas, set out to find Miza. The Congolese rangers, who dedicate their lives to protecting the gorillas, were searching for Miza, too. Everyone was worried about her. Then something amazing happened: Kabirizi found Miza and brought her back to live with her family. Virunga is home to roughly 380 mountain gorillas, just over half of the planet’s remaining mountain gorilla population. Miza and other mountain gorillas face an especially uncertain future. They are an endangered species, disappearing at an alarming speed. Without our help they could vanish completely.
The strong friendship between two boys, one black and one white, who live on a mission in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), begins to unravel as protests against white colonial rule intensify in 1964.