Bronwyn Blake Knihy

'From up here, in my tree house, I can see over our back fence, into the yard of the house where Head was murdered. 'The day I used up the first of my nine lives, I had the worst idea I have ever had in my whole life. This brainwave threatened to shorten it by eighty years and eight lives. But obviously I didn't know all that when I jumped on my skateboard, and sailed around the block to Head's front door!' When Nick Riley decides to talk to his neighbour about the way he mistreats his dog, Nick himself becomes a murder suspect and a thief. Even worse, what he knows about Head's associates, Beale and Mad Pig Perron, could cost him his life. 'Nick Riley's Ninth Life' is a fast-moving adventure story with three young male primary characters. As with 'Dangerous Waters', [same target audience] the books have proved highly successful for early high school reluctant readers, particularly young teenage boys.

Carrie, a desert child, born and raised in the heart of the Australian continent by her grandparents, meets by chance, Anna, a sea child from Flinders Island, first at Kings Canyon, in Central Australia, then at Kett's cattle station in tropical Northern Territory. Carrie is a fiercely independent girl and a passionate naturalist. After living and searching by herself in the desert surrounding Kings Creek Station, her long exploration ends with the astonishing discovery of a thought-to-be extinct marsupial. Anna, also passionate about the sea and its creatures, is far more at home in a fishing boat, and her small wild island, north of Tasmania, in Bass Strait. A tumultuous, and at times terrifying, friendship between the two girls follows, echoed in the lives of their two mothers and the secrets of their past ... the secrets and shocking events which will both separate and bind Carrie and Anna together forever..