Young Adult Fiction
About finding yourself, family and falling in love
Take a moment for yourself. Let go of the responsibilities. Have some fun. Yep. It’s time to connect to your inner teen. Recapture the anything-is-possible energy and maybe resolve a few issues along the way.
Never, Not Ever
Every year, Tilly dreams of the dad she’s never known showing up for her birthday. But he never does. When she wakes up on the morning of her sixteenth birthday dadless yet again, she knows it’ll never happen.
In fact, it’s her worst birthday ever because her grandmother died a few months ago, her mum is working again, and the boy she’s in love with—the ridiculously gorgeous Josh—refuses to break up with this drama-queen girlfriend and notice her instead.
Then Tilly’s dad does show up, shocking everyone, and she works out an awful truth: Her mum and her grandma lied to her. For sixteen years! Tilly is drowning in her family’s lies. Worse, these feelings for her neighbour Zack—these stupid, flustering, more-than-friends feelings she’s been trying to ignore—mean she’s also lying to herself.
A smart summer romance about family secrets, finding yourself, and falling in love, perfect for fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Everything’s Fine, Absolutely Fine
This is the year that 16-year-old Eliza is going to be the best girlfriend ever to the boy she met over summer, win the national debating championships, after failing at the final hurdle last year, and make her mum proud, just like her big sister did when she won the national singing comp.
But Gus seems to have missed the memo about taking on the perfect boyfriend role, and Grandma arrives for a 12 week stay to recover from hip surgery, meaning her mum is too consumed by Grandma dramas to notice Eliza’s achievements. When Declan, the new boy at school and a past national debating champ, joins the debating team, Eliza’s plans for a successful year unravel even further.
If Gus isn’t the boy for her and she doesn’t win the debating championships, then there’s no point. She’s a loser, good for nothing, a total failure. But maybe there is another way that this year can play out and it might just involve exposing some family secrets, confronting her stress eating and befriending that new boy.