Publisher details

Author: Sonya Hartnett
Publisher: Penguin
Genre: Fiction
Released: 01 January, 2000

Thursday’s Child

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Synopsis

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.'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

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).In 2014, Hartnett will publish both a new novel for adults, Golden Boys, and her third picture book, The Wild One.