Sharon Kernot
My debut verse novel for adults will be out in June 2026!
Tell me about your dreams
about your sleep
about your nightmares.
Tell me everything,
he says as he leans
towards me,
his eyes resting
on my thighs.
January Clare Colson is longing for sleep, for release from the wakefulness that is consuming her, haunted by the tragic drowning of her best friend years ago when they were rebellious teens. She’s a mess of pills and broken promises, swimming in desperation.
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Then he walks back into her life, changed but the same, and the events of long ago take a new grip on her. She needs to know what happened. She needs to know him. To call him to account. But her strategy is dangerous, obsessive, warped by insomnia and the intense power of thwarted desire.
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January Clare Colson is standing on the brink of destruction.
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Publication date - January 30, 2024
Maddy is mute. Since the Incident she has barely spoken. And now she and her mother and brother are staying in a farmhouse on an old apricot orchard not far from town. It’s a chance to rest and recuperate – or a way to hide further away from the world.
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Alice is waiting. Since Birdy, her darling daughter, disappeared forty-five years ago, she has sat in her house waiting for her to come home.
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Alice says Maddy reminds her of Birdy, and Maddy feels a strange connection to the long-lost girl.
In the quiet not-speaking and waiting, amid the clutter of the old woman’s house, Maddy and Alice slowly become friends.
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Until Maddy takes something that’s not hers.
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Birdy is a tender warm-hearted verse novel about the pain of loss and shame, the beauty of words, and the healing power of small acts of kindness.
Lottie is fascinated with death. She collects birds, lizards and other small dead animals she finds, trying preserve them, to hold onto the life they once had.
Her aunt tries to put a stop to this worrying obsession, but her father can see a scientist’s mind at work, and he introduces her to the art of taxidermy.
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For Lottie, the beauty and tenderness she finds in her preserved creatures provide a way for her to feel close to the mother she lost.
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The Art of Taxidermy is an exquisitely imagined verse novel about sadness and loss, and the way art and beauty can help us make sense of it all.
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"With exquisite cover art and interior pencil sketches by Edith Rewa, superb design and production values [Imogen Stubbs], and of course, a beautifully told and deeply moving free verse
narrative, The Art of
Taxidermy is an
outstanding addition
to Australian young
adult literature."