Nightpeople Book One Of The Darklands Trilogy

"When you have nowhere left to run, sometimes the only place is the sky...Saria is the last of her kind, the final child to be born in the Darklands, a quarantined expanse of outback desert, contaminated generations earlier by the remote and mysterious Nightpeople. Spirited away at her birth before the Nightpeople could remove her from the genetic pool, Saria, now in her early teens, is called before the Council of Dreamers to be used as a bargaining chip. There she discovers the truth about her own past, and that of her people. Nightpeople explores a society turned in upon itself and a future which readers will find both alien and disturbingly familiar.'This is an outstanding novel, the best work to date from a writer who has already won the Premier's Award: superb writing, a thoroughly engrossing story, and utterly credible characters trapped in a future world that is as fascinating as it is dangerous. A page-turner if ever there was one!' - Van Ikin"

Novel: Nightpeople: Nightpeople is a speculative fiction novel, the first of a trilogy that attempts to pull together a number of distinct threads and goals into one overarching narrative. A major objective of this project was to produce a work of speculative fiction that has a specifically Australian flavour to it. It can be argued that much writing in the speculative fiction genres utilises worlds that are either completely 'other', or are based to varying degrees upon northern hemisphere cultures. Nightpeople is intended to evoke a specifically Antipodean feel and it achieves this through both the selection of atmospherics and language the extrapolation of Australian idiom out to a foreseeable future form, for example, and through selection of its driving themes and ideas. Issues of race, land, belonging, identity, and paternalism in government are all touched upon in the apocalyptic desert landscape of this novel. Another key objective was to produce a work of fiction with equal appeal to both teenage and adult readers. Stylistically, this is achieved through the use of the speculative fiction style of narrative, which is widely read by a broad demographic. Thesis: "Young Adult Friction: The Blurring of Adolescence and Adulthood as Reflected in Australian Young Adult Literature 1982 2006". This is a broad study of current directions in the publishing and awarding of 'Young Adult' fiction within the Australian marketplace. The dissertation suggests that this particular area of writing is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in the way it is perceived by both those practicing within it, and also by the wider community, making it increasingly acceptable for writers in this area to write to an older, more sophisticated readership than previously. The dissertation draws upon a broad statistical analysis of this field over the course of the last twenty years to determine the current trends in style and content being published, and upon a critical/analytical component, which examines several key contemporary writers and texts in more detail.

Teenager Larinan Mann finds that he does not fit into the conformist society he lives in. Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, where people have adapted to climate change by building domes attached to massive towers sheltered from the sun's rays. This world is now under threat of collapse. Suggested level: secondary.

The second book of the Darklands Trilogy opens in Port City, a city built in a series of interconnected Skydomes - thousands of metres above the ground and linked to one another by a series of Magnetic lifts or 'maglifts'. This city stands above the ruins of an ancient city, possibly Perth on the West Coast of Australia.It is home to the race we know from book one as 'nightpeople' - the decendents of the Skypeople of old, who, a millennium earlier when faced with the deterioration of the natural world, built the city (along with several others around the globe) to protect themselves from increasing levels of solar radiation and a rapidly degenerating environment. The 'Skypeople' are an advanced race, something akin to current Western Civilization, who see themselves as the descendents of 'pure' humanity.

Nathan, Gnarly, and the Nuttboard family are back again in this sequel to Eaton's popular Nathan Nuttboard: Hits the Beach.Narelle is as difficult as ever, Dad's still technologically challenged, Mum's her usual assertive self, little sister Nadine is intrusive and Nathan and his friend Gnarly are still up to their sure-to-miss-fire antics. What IS new is the arrival of a little known grandfather from Scotland, Fergus McCraigh. Self-centred, overbearing, canny, rude, Fergus makes life miserable for all the members of the family. Once again the siblings unite for a turn of slap-stick humour, this time to scare off Fergus, who, it must be said, is remarkably resilient.

When you've run from the past, you have to stand and face the future ... Dara, her brother Jaran and their cousin Eyna have grown up among the Clan; their lives are peaceful as they eke out an existence in the towering forest below their escarpment home. But when the ghosts of a dead civilisation reach out to haunt them one final time, they and their family must set out, on an unmapped path across a dying land. Walking daywards, always into the sun. Daywards is the highly anticipated conclusion to a powerful trilogy from award-winning author Anthony Eaton.

A special reissue of a powerful and haunting Australian classic from award-winning author Anthony Eaton You let your sister burn. When Vinnie’s sister is killed, he runs away from the accusing eyes of his father to the isolation of the bush. There, he must answer a question … was it his fault? In 1941, German soldier Erich is sent miles away from his family after being captured and interned in an Australian prisoner-of-war camp. Despite everything he’s grown up believing, Erich must learn to co-exist with his sworn enemy and, in doing so, question his father’s expectations that have defined his existence. Amid the rain soaked forests of South Western Australia, these two young men’s lives collide across the years, changing them both as they struggle to escape their painful memories of fireshadow. Some battles are imposed on us, some fought within.

There have been many great and enduring works of literature by Caribbean authors over the last century. The Caribbean Contemporary Classics collection celebrates these deep and vibrant stories, overflowing with life and acute observations about society. Written as a series of letters from the child Sunshine to her absent mother, Aunt Jen traces the changing attitudes of a child entering adulthood as she tries to understand the truth behind her mother's departure, and make sense of her relationship with her family. Aunt Jen migrated to England as part of the Windrush generation, and Sunshine's letters, written in the early 1970s, reveal something of the emotional as well as the physical gulf between those who left and those who remained behind. A companion novel to Letters Home, Aunt Jen is a painfully one-sided correspondence, revealing the complex inheritance we pass on to our children. Suitable for readers aged 14 and above.