The Shiny Guys

Author	Claire Zorn
ISBN	0702249769

For Fin, it's just like any other day - racing for the school bus, bluffing his way through class, and trying to remain cool in front of the most sophisticated girl in his universe, Lucy. Only it's not like any other day because, on the other side of the world, nuclear missiles are being detonated.

When...

Author	Sandy McKay
ISBN	1877361747

"I'll go bonkers in here, Issy. It's like prison except at least in prison you have some freedoms."

Fifteen-year-old Johanna Morrison is in hospital, writing letters to her best friend, Issy. As part of her therapy Jo is not allowed to leave her room, use the phone, have visitors or even wash...

Author	Ambelin Kwaymullina
ISBN	1921720093

"However this ends, you're probably going to find out some things about me, and they're not nice things. But, Ash, even after you know, do you think you could remember the good? And whatever you end up discovering - try to think of me kindly. If you can."

Ember Crow is missing. To find her friend,...

Author	Lili Wilkinson
ISBN	1742376231

Penny Drummond aspires to be a prize-winning journalist. In the meantime, she's honing her skills on the school paper. When she discovers a boy at her school is posting anonymous messages on a love-shy forum, Penny believes she has found just the story she needs.

Her mission: find him, fix...

Author	Kate Gordon
ISBN	1743316631

You said we could write anything we wanted. The first thing that came into our minds. Blue fish, red fish, green fish...

Clementine Darcy is floundering. She wants to be the kind of a fish who swims to the swish of her own fins - upstream, not simply carried along by the current.

But she...

Author	Christine Bongers
ISBN	0857983768

I don't walk past the house next door. I wish the woman who lives in it was dead. Which makes it hard . . . because she was the one who came running when I screamed.

Kat Jones is woken by an Intruder looming over her bed. She's saved by Edwina – the neighbour Kat believes betrayed her dying mother....

Author

Sue Lawson

3.5 stars.

This was...yeah. It's an important book. But I think ultimately it focuses too much on the wrong thing. Because on the one hand, this is a young adult book about racism towards Indigenous Australians in the 1960s, which is EXCELLENT because it's a problem that's often overlooked...

Author

Catherine Jinks

Marcus doesn't even want to go away for the summer. And his Mum's fond memories of Diamond Beach turn out to be nothing like reality. This could be his worst holiday ever…
But things quickly become more interesting when Marcus discovers the hidden cellar in their smelly old caravan. There, he and...

Author	Steven Herrick
ISBN	0702249289

Pookie Aleera is Not My Boyfriend is a charming and delightful little book about a group of school-kids living in a small rural Australian town. It's written as a verse novel – each chapter is a short non-rhyming poem – but this isn't the boring, difficult poetry you have to study at school: it's honest,...

Author	Richard Harland
ISBN	1743310056

Seventeen-year-old Astor thinks she is about the wed the handsome plutocrat Lorrain Swale. But, to her horror, her mother and step-father abandon her, and she finds herself a lowly governess in the Swale household. Treated with contempt by the whole family, Astor is determined to escape. Help arrives...

Author	Marlee Jane Ward
ISBN	1921134593

A sharp-edged semi-futuristic riff about a rebellious teenager's last week at an industrial orphanage.

'Takes all of your dystopian nightmares and connects them to a mother lode of pure emotional intensity. There's so much keen detail here about the cruel logic of oppressive institutions,...

Author	Mark Smith
ISBN	1925498530

In Wilder Country, Mark Smith continues the story of Finn, Kas and Willow as they fight to survive in a dystopian world. They are teenagers who have had to grow up quickly after losing parents to the virus that has devastated their world and are smart and wise beyond their years. Together they have formed...

Author	Leanne Hall
ISBN	1921758643

I really liked Leanne Hall's debut novel This is Shyness . The world that Hall created was phenomenal - a perpetually night-bound suburb called Shyness where the sun has stopped rising; the relationship that blossoms wildly over the course of 24 hours between two strangers from opposite sides of...

Author	Gabrielle Williams
ISBN	0143566849

But there I go, getting ahead of myself. Skipping straight to the part where I was front-page news and they were calling me Dorothy, instead of starting at the beginning...

When Dodie's parents go missing just as final year exams are about to start, she convinces herself they're fine. But when...

Author

Michael Pryor

All Kingsley wants is to begin his career as an escapologist and conjurer . . . but it seems that it's not only his fiendishly difficult-to-control wolfishness that could put a spanner in the works.

There's also the Immortals, a triumvirate of thousand-year-old magicians who want to rule the...

Author	Cassandra Golds
ISBN	1935279130

This is one of those books that is impossible to categorize. Although it at first seems meant for children, as Heloise is clearly a child, some of the almost spiritual or metaphysical themes of the story would fly way over a child's head - and as Heloise grows older, so do these themes rise to the forefront...

Author	Leah Giarratano
ISBN	0143565680

There are some things I saw done very well in Giarratano's new novel, Disharmony. Her first mark comes for characterization as she successfully builds and maintains several very authentic, interesting voices. Each with a story that is a little like a crocheted doily in how the pattern touches at the...

Author

Kate Constable

From the author of the Chanters of Tremaris series comes  a contemporary time travel fantasy, grounded in the landscape of Australia 

Beginning and ending, always the same, always now. The game, the story, the riddle, hiding and seeking. Crow comes from this place; this place comes from...

Author	Dianne Touchell
ISBN	1921888954

Hilarious and heartbreaking, Creepy & Maud charts the relationship between two social misfits, played out in the space between their windows.

Creepy is a boy who watches from the shadows keenly observing and caustically commentating on human folly.

Maud is less certain. A...

Author

Neil Grant

Each step becomes a heartbeat and I feel the distance between Omed and me closing. I remember when I first met him - when he had showed me what bravery meant. How he had stood up for what he believed. In the end that had been his undoing. The Ink Bridge is the compelling story of two young men: Omed, an Afghani...

Author	Simon French
ISBN	1921720832

Kieran wants to be part of the in-group at school. He wants to be on the football team. He wants to fit in. But then his cousin Bon turns up. Bon doesn’t know anything about fitting in – he looks different, he wears the wrong clothes, and he says weird things. Kieran just wants to ignore Bon, but soon he...

Author	Darren Groth
ISBN	1459814096

Since the sudden death of his younger sister, Evie, sixteen-year-old Munro Maddux has been having flashbacks and anger-management issues. He has a constant ache in his right hand. And there's a taunting, barking, biting voice he calls "The Coyote." Munro knows a six-month student exchange will not...

Author	Andrew McGahan
ISBN	1742376479

This is my second reread of 'The Coming of the Whirlpool' and it literally couldn't get any better EVERY SINGLE TIME. I love everything about this book: the characters, and the brave soul that is Dow Amber; the setting which ranges from the headland forests and pines to the bays and seas of New Island; the...

Author

Suzy Zail

The story of a Jewish girl sent to Auschwitz with her family. She falls in love with the wrong boy – the German son of the camp commander.

Hanna is a talented pianist, and the protected second daughter of middle class Hungarian Jews. Relatively late in World War II the Budapest Jews were rounded...