Archives par étiquette : Text Publishing

ALL THE LITTLE TRICKY THINGS de Karys McEwen

A charming, heartfelt middle-grade novel about a time when everything is changing, and a girl who’s trying to make sense of it all.

ALL THE LITTLE TRICKY THINGS
by Karys McEwen
Text Publishing Australia, May 2022

It’s the start of the summer holidays and eleven-year-old Bertie is worried. Next year she’s going to a high school in the city, while all her friends stay behind in Merri, the small town she’s lived in all her life. To help her feel better prepared for high school, her best friend, Claire, makes a list of eleven tasks Bertie has to complete over the summer. They start working through the list together, but the tasks begin to reveal some of the cracks in their friendship. Now Bertie’s not even sure she’ll have one friend by the end of the summer.

Karys McEwen is the current president of the Victorian branch of the Children’s Book Council of Australia. She is also a school librarian, and she is passionate about the role libraries and literature play in the wellbeing of young people. She has been a columnist for Books+Publishing and her work has appeared in library journals such as FYI, Synergy and Connections. ALL THE LITTLE TRICKY THINGS is her debut middle-grade novel.

UNNECESSARY DRAMA de Nina Kenwood

UNNECESSARY DRAMA follows Brooke as she navigates friendship, romance, ex-best friends, exboyfriends, housemates, her own overly anxious tendencies and what it means to find a home away from home.

UNNECESSARY DRAMA
by Nina Kenwood
Text Publishing Australia, October 2022

Brooke likes order, she likes lists, she likes rules. The first and only rule of her new sharehouse is ‘no unnecessary drama’. Which means no fights, no tension, and absolutely no romance with housemates Penny and Jesse. That’s fine by Brooke, because she has plans. This is going to be her year: her first year of university, the year she’s moved to Melbourne, and the year she’s going to live up to all of her potential. But things get off to a bad start: university isn’t what she thought it would be; she’s desperately homesick, chronically anxious and, to add to her problems, Brooke might be developing inconvenient romantic feelings for off-limits housemate Jesse.

Nina Kenwood is a writer, who lives in Melbourne. She won the 2018 Text Prize for her debut young adult novel, It Sounded Better in My Head.

DANCING BAREFOOT d’Alice Boyle

A story about finding love, figuring out your place in the world, and learning to embrace the challenges life throws in your path.

DANCING BAREFOOT
by Alice Boyle
Text Publishing, Summer 2022

Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Patch is also trying to avoid a vindictive school bully, forgetting to be supportive of her transitioning best friend, Edwin, and worrying about a potential new stepmother turning out to be the evil Baroness from The Sound of Music.

Winner of the 2021 Text Prize

Alice Boyle is an English teacher and author living in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s written for SBS Voices and the Stella Prize, and her short story ‘The Exchange’ was published in the anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia. In 2019 she was highly commended for the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program.

CHILDHOOD de Shannon Burns

In this arresting memoir, Shannon Burns recalls a childhood bouncing between dysfunctional homes in outer-suburban Adelaide, between impoverished family members unwilling or unable to care for him.

CHILDHOOD
by Shannon Burns
Text Publishing Australia, September 2022

This is what I think I know: my father met my mother while he was dating her sister. Their love was figured on betrayal, both hostile and libidinous. She was in her late teens. He was twenty and travelled everywhere barefoot. Neither had finished high school and both were decorated with amateur tattoos. Things may have been good for a while, but it didn’t last: they argued fiercely and he left. Weeks later, she tracked him down and said she was pregnant. So he moved back in, and they prepared themselves for parenthood.
Eleven months later I was born. By the time my father discovered the deception, it was too late.
There is something chastening about this mode of conception, about knowing that, by most ordinary standards, your beginning was aberrant.

Aged nine, Shannon Burns beats his head against the floor to get himself to sleep. Aged ten, he knows his mother will never be able to care for him: he is alone, and can trust no-one.
Five years later, he is working in a recycling centre—hard labour, poorly paid—yet reading offers hope. He begins reciting lines from Dante, Keats, Whitman, speeches by Martin Luther King, while sifting through the filthy cans and bottles. An affair with the mother of a schoolfriend offers a way out, a path to eventual independence and a life utterly unlike the one he was born into.
‘I want to imagine the past,’ Burns says, ‘in order to discard it more fully. I want to ensure that its power over me is diluted even further, to forestall the possibility of a more damaging reckoning.’ He writes concisely, sketching crisp scenes that often terrify in their brutality. Possessing a clarity of purpose and vividness of expression that bring to mind Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, this book is destined to be a classic.

Shannon Burns is a writer and critic from Adelaide. His work has appeared in the Monthly, Meanjin and Australian Book Review.

AFTER YOU WERE GONE de Vikki Wakefield

What happens to a family when a child goes missing? How far would you go to learn the truth? AFTER YOU WERE GONE is Vikki Wakefield’s first psychological thriller.

AFTER YOU WERE GONE
by Vikki Wakefield
Text Publishing Australia, September 2022

In a busy street market, Abbie lets go of six-year-old Sarah’s hand. She isn’t a bad mother, just exhausted. When she turns around, her daughter isn’t there. After a full-scale search and a highprofile investigation, there is still no trace of Sarah.
Six years later, Abbie is in love and getting married. Her family, despite their problems, have seen her through her worst imaginings—only Abbie’s mother seems unwilling to let her move on. Her fragile peace is constantly threatened: not knowing what happened to Sarah is like living with a curse.
Then a phone call from an unknown number offers closure. A man claims to know what happened to Sarah, but if Abbie tells anyone or fails to follow instructions, she’ll never find out. What price must Abbie pay to know the truth?

Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for young adults and adults. Her work explores family, class and relationships in a contemporary setting. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl have been shortlisted for numerous awards. This is How We Change the Ending won Book of the Year: Older Readers, Children’s Book Council Awards, 2020. AFTER YOU WERE GONE is her first novel for adults. Vikki lives in Adelaide, Australia.