Just as authors create books, books create authors — and these essays by thirty-one writers for young people offer a fascinating glimpse at the books that inspired them the most.What if you could look inside your favorite authors’ heads and see the book that led them to become who they are today? What was the book that made them fall in love, or made them understand something for the first time? What was the book that made them feel challenged in ways they never kn...

A gripping, gritty and award-winning coming-of-age novel for young adult readers. When Te Arepa Santos is dragged into the river by a giant eel, something happens that will change the course of his whole life. The boy who struggles to the bank is not the same one who plunged in, moments earlier. He has brushed against the spirit world, and there is a price to be paid; an utu (revenge) to be exacted. Years later, far from the protection of whanau (family) and ancestral land...

Which street racer really controls the strip? An award-winning YA novel full of fast cars, burn-offs and an unwritten code of loyalty. 'Thunder Road' . You find it in any city after the cops are in bed. It's where street racers go to test their machines - and their nerve. For me it was … the steep rising pitch of the turbo, the screaming tyres and curtain of white smoke hanging behind me: all the stuff that spells street racing.' Trace is 19 and has grown out of small-tow...

Adventure, danger and mystery from the award-winning Ted Dawe. ‘The year mum died and Dad went mad I was packed off to a farm for a while.’ The first sentence sets the scene for this tender and dramatic story. But this is no ordinary farm: our narrator’s Aunt Lorna, Uncle Frank and five cousins belong to the Jerusalem League, a William Blake cult. Their house is unusual, in that the rooms are hexagons – six-sided – as are the doors and windows, the dinner table and plates....

Meet Jazz and Roxy and their mates, kids living on the edge, in a gritty YA novel by the author of the New Zealand Post Award-winning Thunder Road. In K Road we’re introduced to a scattering of marginalised, demi-underworld characters whose lives connect and collide in a gripping narrative. K Road is peopled by transients, surfies, gang members, street kids, P-heads, kids on the run: an ever-expanding,jostling urban tribe. Dawe’s...

A collection of 32 personal stories.The Book That Made Me is a celebration of the books that influenced some of the most acclaimed authors from Australia and the world. Edited by Judith Ridge, it features non-fiction stories from 32 inspiring and award-winning authors including Markus Zusak, Jaclyn Moriarty, Shaun Tan, Mal Peet, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Simon French, Alison Croggon, Fiona Wood, Bernard Beckett, Ursula Dubosarsky, Rachael Craw, Sue Lawson, Benj...