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...

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...