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  • Published: 27 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9780143571766
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $26.00

Thursday's Child




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.

Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year

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.

'In its evocation of the adult world seen through the eyes of a child, this book has the feel of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird . . . A deep, and deeply moving, novel.' The Guardian (UK)

'If Hartnett was published in the era before young-adult fiction and I was casting about for comparisons, then the name Harper Lee wouldn't be a bad call.' Sunday Age

'Like all of Hartnett's novels, this one is inhabited by engagingly vulnerable, sometimes damaged characters, and it unfolds in mesmerisingly precise and minutely observant prose.' Canberra Times

  • Published: 27 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9780143571766
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Sonya Hartnett

Sonya Hartnett's work has won numerous Australian and international literary prizes and has been published around the world. Uniquely, she is acclaimed for her stories for adults, young adults and children. Her accolades include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Of A Boy), The Age Book of the Year (Of A Boy), the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize (Thursday's Child), the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for both Older and Younger Readers (Forest, The Silver Donkey, The Ghost's Child, The Midnight Zoo and The Children of the King), the Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Surrender), shortlistings for the Miles Franklin Award (for both Of a Boy and Butterfly) and the CILP Carnegie Medal (The Midnight Zoo). Hartnett is also the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2008).

Golden Boys, Sonya’s third novel for adults, was shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She also published her fourth picture book, Blue Flower, illustrated by Gabriel Evans, in 2021 and it was shortlisted for the CBCA Picture Book of the Year Award.

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