THURSDAY'S CHILD

"The creature held a great bundle of something tied up in a rag. For a moment we stared, not recognising him, but who else could it have been, who else but wandering Tin. We saw his naked limbs, his discoloured hair, his hooking razor-sharp nails. He raised lashy eyes to us and we saw a face on its way to another world. Da murmured, 'Jesus'."

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.

Sonya Hartnett's work has been published around the world. She is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels, including Thursday's Child, winner of the 2002 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and Forest, winner of the 2002 Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year: Older Readers. In 2003, her adult novel, Of a Boy, won The Age Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2000 and again in 2003, Sonya Hartnett has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelists of the Year.
In 2004, The Silver Donkey was published to great critical acclaim. It has won the 2005 Brisbane Courier Mail award for young readers and was CBC Book of the Year (Young readers) in 2005.
Surrender was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award and the Aurealis Award - Fantasy Division in 2005. In 2008 Sonya was the recipient of The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The prize is awarded to authors, illustrators, narrators and/or promoters of reading whose work reflects the spirit of Astrid Lindgren. It is the first time this award has gone to an Australian.
In 2010 Sonya published her debut picture book, The Boy and the Toy which was followed by Come Down, Cat! in 2011. 2010 also saw the publication of The Midnight Zoo, which won the CBC Book of the Year (Older Readers) in 2011 and was nominated for the CILP Carnegie Medal (UK) for Best Children's Book. Her most recent novel is The Children of the King.