I met Julia through the West Australian chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and love her work for children and young adults, which is beautifully written and insightful, especially Before You Forget about a young teen coming to terms with her father's early dementia. In the lead-up to the release of her memoir, How to Avoid a Happy Life, Julia released a series of blogs featuring extracts and sharing her experience of writing such a personal book. From her memoir's opening sentence - 'There is a photo of my mother in a coffin.' - I could not put it down. As the blurb says, Julia's life has been 'stranger than fiction...a wild and marvellous tale', which she recounts with raw honesty, compassion, insight and a liberal dose of humour. How to Avoid a Happy Life a compelling read.
Some people are born into bad situations, some people have bad situations thrust upon them, and some people find bad situations through their dodgy choices, lack of information and personal idiosyncrasies. Julia’ s life sits at the intersection of all three. From high school dropout on a psych ward to card-carrying lesbian on a motorbike, from enduring a controlling relationship with her ex-lover’ s brother to being chased by a media scrum outside a Perth court, the life of beloved children’ s author Julia Lawrinson is stranger than fiction – and she draws on all her power as a storyteller…
This is crime writing at its best, a gripping suspense novel that kept me turning the pages to find out whether justice would prevail over wealth and privilege. Dervla McTiernan has crafted a compelling read that I feel is her best novel yet.
I was impressed by how well White crafted this thriller to keep me guessing what actually happened till the closing pages. The plot twist took me completely by surprise, and that rarely happens.
The second standalone thriller from Christian White, the award-winning author of The Nowhere Child.
Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and The Widow is an unsettling thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside when she’s forced to confront the evidence of her husband’s guilt. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the…
The Mum Protector never lets Callum do anything other kids do. It’s a miracle she’s agreed he can attend his first ever school camp. He won’t get to go if she finds out he’s changing colour. That’s not the only weird thing happening since Callum found a strange object at the local quarry after their neighbour claimed a flying saucer chased him home. Lara, the oddball girl from school, is reading his mind, and now they have both been called on to help two stranded young aliens who want to get home. Will Callum and Lara get their interplanetary visitors safely away from Earth before the Department of Off Planet Entries catches them?
