A stunning and lyrical debut novel Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had unravelled many times before. This time it explodes. Eight-year-old Hariet, known to all as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. But Mary and her partner, Nia, offer an unexpected refuge to Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. Yet the respite does not last, and Ari is torn from her aunts and forced back to her twisted mother and fractured sisters. Her new stepfather, Len, and his family offer hope, but as Ari grows to adore them, sheÍs severed violently from them too, when her mother moves in with the brutal Dick Irwin. Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her fatherÍs legacy and her motherÍs addictions, testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. Ari spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love, the devilish and divine, with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses. The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force about a child sculpted by kindness, cruelty, and the extraordinary power of imagination, and her families „ the one sheÍs born in to and the one she creates.
An emotional exploration of the frayed bond between a father and daughter...and what it takes to mend it. After Sara's father, famous sculptor Thomas "TR" Harlow, is badly injured in a fire, she's suddenly forced to care for a man who is more of a stranger than a parent. Once known as his muse, Sara long ago lost her father to his desire to live the celebrity life. Now TR's abrasive and unpredictable presence in her home is reopening old wounds--and causing the rift in her already-strained marriage to deepen. As her young son begins bonding with the grandfather he never knew, Sara must decide if she can find it within herself to forgive the man who broke her heart all those years ago. Will she walk away from a chance to rebuild what was lost, or will she find, by bringing her father back to health, that healing can come in many forms?
The Newbery Medal–winning author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! gives readers a virtuoso performance in verse in this profoundly original epic pitched just right for fans of poetry, history, mythology, and fantasy. Welcome to ancient Greece as only genius storyteller Laura Amy Schlitz can conjure it. In a warlike land of wind and sunlight, “ringed by a restless sea,” live Rhaskos and Melisto, spiritual twins with little in common beyond the violent and mysterious forces that dictate their lives. A Thracian slave in a Greek household, Rhaskos is as common as clay, a stable boy worth less than a donkey, much less a horse. Wrenched from his mother at a tender age, he nurtures in secret, aided by Socrates, his passions for art and philosophy. Melisto is a spoiled aristocrat, a girl as precious as amber but willful and wild. She’ll marry and be tamed—the curse of all highborn girls—but risk her life for a season first to serve Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Bound by destiny, Melisto and Rhaskos—Amber and Clay—never meet in the flesh. By the time they do, one of them is a ghost. But the thin line between life and death is just one boundary their unlikely friendship crosses. It takes an army of snarky gods and fearsome goddesses, slaves and masters, mothers and philosophers to help shape their story into a gorgeously distilled, symphonic tour de force. Blending verse, prose, and illustrated archeological “artifacts,” this is a tale that vividly transcends time, an indelible reminder of the power of language to illuminate the over- and underworlds of human history.
A Summer To Remember Fourteen-year-old Clay Lancaster has been dreaming for years of the adventure he calls The Big Wander -- a summer in the Southwest with his older brother, Mike, searching for their uncle Clay. When Mike decides to return home to Seattle and the girlfriend he left behind, Clay chooses to stay on and continue the search on his own. Following a tip about his uncle, he heads out into the most remote canyons of the Navajo reservation, with only a burro and a dog named Curly for company. Clay loses his heart to the vast, rugged land -- and to an adventurous girl with a long, dark braid -- but finds his uncle in big trouble. Can Clay pull off a risky plan to save his uncle -- and the wild horses Uncle Clay has put his own life in jeopardy to protect?
Clay is a man of few human talents. As a wolf, he hunts well and can fight off a grizzly twice his size, but has no aspirations. The idea of a Mate isn’t something he has ever seriously entertained. Dreamed about, maybe, but he knows the chances are nearly non-existent. Then he meets Gabby, a human girl. She hates him at first sight, yet he can’t let her go. Who he was is no longer important. Now, who he needs to become to win her over is the only thing that matters.
An edgy, affecting, and darkly funny debut novel — narrated by Skunk, an eleven-year-old girl in a coma — that explores innocence and its betrayal as powerfully and unforgettably as do Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Lovely Bones Skunk Cunningham’s world is a small one, populated by her family; her teachers and schoolmates; and her neighbours, the quiet Buckley family and the five terrifying Oswald girls and their thug of a father, Bob. When Saskia Oswald, with her stilettos and tight pants, asks shy Rick Buckley for a ride in his new car, he can’t believe his luck. But after a quick fumble, Saskia broadcasts Rick’s deficiencies to anyone who will listen, including her younger sisters. This act of thoughtless cruelty will see Rick dragged off by the police, humiliated, and “broken,” — and, in a tragic chain of events, will leave Skunk hanging on to her young life by a thread. From her hospital bed, Skunk shows us her hapless father finding love, and her idealistic favourite teacher losing it; “Broken” Buckley spiralling into madness; and the Oswald clan coming apart at the seams. As we inch ever closer to the mystery behind her coma, Skunk’s innocence becomes a beacon by which we navigate a world as comic as it is tragic, and as engaging as it is finally uplifting. Broken introduces Daniel Clay as a brilliant and utterly original voice in international fiction.
Red Clay Girl is the heartbreaking, hilarious, and tenacious story of a middle child's journey from small town Georgia to New York City and beyond. When she reaches her unplanned destination, self-acceptance, you'll shout hallelujah!
For readers of Girl in Pieces and The Way I Used to Be comes an emotionally gripping story about facing hard truths in the aftermath of sexual assault. Mara and Owen are as close as twins can get, so when Mara’s friend Hannah accuses Owen of rape, Mara doesn't know what to think. Can her brother really be guilty of such a violent act? Torn between her family and her sense of right and wrong, Mara feels lost, and it doesn’t help that things are strained with her ex-girlfriend, Charlie. As Mara, Hannah, and Charlie come together in the aftermath of this terrible crime, Mara must face a trauma from her own past and decide where Charlie fits into her future. With sensitivity and openness, this timely novel confronts the difficult questions surrounding consent, victim blaming, and sexual assault.
From the author of the no.1 New York Times bestselling novel The Book Thief. "An amazing talent in Australian literature" Sunday Telegraph The Dunbar boys bring each other up in a house run by their own rules. A family of ramshackle tragedy - their mother is dead, their father has fled - they love and fight, and learn to reckon with the adult world. It is Clay, the quiet one, who will build a bridge; for his family, for his past, for his sins. He builds a bridge to transcend humanness. To survive. A miracle and nothing less. WINNER INDIE BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABIA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2020 PRAISE FOR BRIDGE OF CLAY "I am pleased to recommend...Markus Zusak's extraordinary novel Bridge of Clay, which I suspect I'll reread many times. It's a sprawling, challenging, and endlessly rewarding book. But it also has the raw and real and unironized emotion that courses through all of Zusak's books. I'm in awe of him." John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska "Exquisitely written multigenerational family saga...With heft and historical scope, Zusak creates a sensitively rendered tale of loss, grief, and guilt's manifestations." Publishers Weekly "An evocative, compassionate and exquisitely composed coming-of-age story about family, love, tragedy and forgiveness. Zusak's prose is distinct: astute, witty, exquisitely rhythmic, and utterly engrossing." Australian Books+Publishing Magazine "Zusak is a writer of extraordinary empathy and he excels in his understanding of adolescent boys...in his portrayal of the gently traumatised Clay he has created a memorable character to savour... in Bridge of Clay, as earlier in The Book Thief, Zusak has succeeded in creating a story so vibrant and so real that the reader feels enveloped by it." The Australian "This vast novel is a feast of language and irony. It is such a compassionate book that it is hard not to fall a bit in love with it yourself. Bridge of Clay shares with Zusak's The Book Thief an underlying sense of the possibility of joy and human dignity even in dehumanising situations." Sydney Morning Herald "A complex, big-hearted, multi-generational Australian epic, highly evocative and rich in idiom that sprawls across 580 pages, much in the manner of Colleen McCullough, or Tim Winton's Cloudstreet." Good Weekend Magazine "In 2005, the Australian writer dazzled readers and secured a perch on bestseller lists with The Book Thief ...this book too is a stunner. Devastating, demanding and deeply moving, Bridge of Clay unspools like a kind of magic act in reverse, with feats of narrative legerdemain concealed by misdirection that all make sense only when the elements of the trick are finally laid out. In words that seem to ache with emotion, or perhaps, more aptly, with the suppression of it, Mr. Zusak moves us in and out of time. Grief and sacrifice lie at the heart of things, and we can feel it through Mr. Zusak's writing even before we understand the story's real contours." Wall Street Journal "What truly stands out about Bridge of Clay is the intensity of the prose - the potency of the heartbreak. The depth of grief and loss is so palpable you can all but feel the blood, sweat, and tears that went into crafting the story." Entertainment Weekly "As with The Book Thief, much of the appeal of the novel lies in Zusak's heartfelt love for his characters and for language. The book sings in short musical sentences like poetry, and words stop you in your tracks." Herald Sun
“It is the voice of the characters, the kindness of strangers, and the ingenuity and determination of our protagonist against terrible forces that make this story sing.” — San Francisco Chronicle on Tucker’s debut, The Clay Girl From the author of the Indie Next List pick The Clay Girl comes a deeply moving novel about the resilience of a remarkable young woman unraveling the mystery of a missing friend while struggling to grow past the trauma of her calamitous upbringing. From the waning flower-power ’60s in Toronto through her East Coast university years, Ari fights to discover who she is and what it means to be the child of an addicted mother and depraved father. When her friend Natasha, the perfect girl from the nicest family, suddenly vanishes, Ari sets out to find out what has happened to her — are her troubled parents to blame? With wit, tenacity, and the incessant meddling of Jasper — the seahorse in her head — Ari rides turbulent waves of devilry and discovery, calamity and creation, abandonment and atonement on a journey to find her true self, and to find Natasha. Cracked Pots is a story about a girl broken by both cruelty and truth. It is a revelation that destiny is shaped in clay, not stone. It is also a celebration of rising after the blows, gathering the fragments, and piecing together a remarkable life through creativity, kindness, and belonging.
