Books with title Thursday’s Child

Maggie is a spirited child. Happy and carefree, growing up in a village on an apple orchard where neighbours are good friends and the local landowner, the Squire, is a fair, decent man to his workers. Life should be idyllic, if not for the unwelcome intrusion of air raids. This is Kent, 1941, and World War II is raging. Maggie and her family endure the war only to realise that war comes in many guises. When peacetime is declared in 1945, a different kind of war erupts within her own family with the death of her father and the self-centredness and cruelty of her mother. Life changes from one of happy frivolity to despair and misery. But Maggie is resilient. Despite what life throws at her, the village, her friends, and a yearning for a new life in Australia - a country she has never been to but is fascinated with - all give her the strength to keep moving forward. Ultimately, she learns the most valuable of lessons: to believe in her dreams and to believe in herself.

"A startling coming-of-age story. . . . Through Harper, Hartnett captures the humanity of her spirited, slightly eccentric, and then nearly broken characters." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)Harper Flute believes that her younger brother Tin, with his uncanny ability to dig, was born to burrow. While their family struggles to survive in a bleak landscape during the Great Depression, the silent and elusive little Tin begins to tunnel beneath their tiny shanty. As time passes, Tin becomes a wild thing, leaving his family further and further behind. Sonya Hartnett tells a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story through the clear eyes of an observant child, with exquisite prose, richly drawn characters, and a touch of magical realism.

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.

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.

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.