Readings.com.au: Sonya Hartnett

The Ghost's Child

A strange boy suddenly appears in a lonely old woman’s lounge room. As she serves him tea, Hartnett observes that the milk turns the tea ‘a pressed-rose brown’ and immediately we are in a world where language makes exhilarating leaps with apparently no effort at all. Conversation with the boy sends the woman back to a troubled childhood and another ghost of a boy, whom she once thought the most beautiful thing in the world. This deceptively simple fable about love is full of wisdom and beauty for young adults who enjoy literary fiction. Age 12+

Thursdays Child

The creature held a great bundle of something tied up in a rag. For a moment we stared, not recognising him, but who else could it have been, who else but wandering Tin. We saw his naked limbs, his discoloured hair, his hooking razor-sharp nails. He raised lashy eyes to us and we saw a face on its way to another world. Da murmured, 'Jesus'.

Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.

Sleeping Dogs

The Willows own a decaying caravan park. When trusting Oliver befriends an outsider intent on uncovering the secrets of their family, the Willows' world is blown apart in a shocking climax. Published to much acclaim, Sleeping Dogs was the winner of both the 1996 Victorian Premier's Literary Award Sheaffer Pen Prize and the 1996 Miles Franklin Inaugural Kathleen Mitchell Award.

Of A Boy

The year is 1977, and Adrian is nine. He lives with his gran and his uncle Rory; his best friend is Clinton Tull. He loves to draw and he wants a dog; he's afraid of quicksand and self-combustion. Adrian watches his suburban world, but there is much he cannot understand. He does not, for instance, know why three neighbourhood children might set out to buy ice-cream and never come back home . . .

The Silver Donkey

One bright spring morning in the woods of France, a soldier, blinded by the war, is found by a little girl named Coco, and her older sister Marcelle. In return for their kindness, the soldier tells the sisters marvellous tales, each story connected to the keepsake he carries in his pocket: a perfect, tiny silver donkey. As the days pass and they struggle in secret to help the soldier reach home, Coco and Marcelle learn the truth behind the silver donkey, and what the precious object means: honesty, loyalty, and courage.

Stripes Of The Sidestep Wolf

In a dying country town lives a young man fighting the future, a young woman fighting the past, and a long-lost animal that can teach them both the art of survival.

The animal swerved into the bracken, its smooth long tail slippin g away. Satchel listened a minute for any sign of it but it was gone. . . He wondered what its name had been, who had o wned it, what hard history had left it alone here, at the foot of the hanging volcano.

Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf is a shimmering, ultimately joyful novel, a story of journeying towards courage and freedom, of finding the wi ll to live a life beyond expectation.

'What an intriguing writer Sony Hartnett is.' The Observer

Forest

The forest is earth and leaves,
sun and shade, feather and blood and bone.

It is the old way, the true way
the wild way to live.

But, for Kian, wilderness is not home.

Surrender

For Gabriel, the end cannot come soon enough. Dying a lonely, slow and painful death, his conscious moments are haunted by memories of his isolated childhood in an unforgiving country town and the mistake he made as a child that destroyed his life. He is also haunted by his boyhood friend, Finnigan, a rakish and dangerous figure who brought their sleepy town to its knees and turned citizen against citizen with a malicious arson campaign. The only two things that have brought pleasure to Gabriel during his wretched life are Evangeline – the vivacious local girl for whom he harbours an intense and secret desire, and Surrender, the feisty mongrel his father allowed him to adopt in a moment of weakness. But even these are destroyed by the manipulative and possessive Finnigan, determined to bring Gabriel down even on his deathbed. A tense and unnerving drama, Surrender will have you hooked until its surprising conclusion.

Kate O’Mara is from Readings Carlton

Wilful Blue

A chilling, subtle, deeply absorbing mystery. Seven gifted young artists are collected together in a monastery. But tensions build, and death follows.

All My Dangerous Friends

Louie has finished with her old life, and stepped into a world of sinners. For her, nothing is going to be the same again. This darkly funny, disturbing novel explores a lawless world where morality is a nuisance, everything can be bought, and the prices paid are high.

Princes

Indigo and Ravel are identical twins. When one threatens to break out of their obsessive, dependent relationship, there are disastrous consequences. A dark, brilliant novel with Gothic overtones, from this extraordinary young writer

Sadie And Ratz: Aussie Nibbles

Watch out, Baby Boy!

Sadie and Ratz are on the rampage!