Watching over his sleeping son, the father reflects on the dangerous sea-crossing that lies before them. It is also a vivid portrait of their life in Homs, Syria, before the war, and of that city's swift transformation from a home into a deadly war zone. Impelled to write this story by the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed upon the beach in Turkey in September 2015, Hosseini hopes to pay tribute to the millions of families, like Kurdi's, who have been splintered and forced from home by war and persecution, and he will donate author proceeds from this book to the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and The Khaled Hosseini Foundation to help fund lifesaving relief efforts to help refugees around the globe. Hosseini is also a Goodwill Envoy to the UNHCR, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

    John was half-white, and the law said he had to be educated in a mission school to learn the ways of white people. But John never forgot his real home - or his mother, who dared to trick the men from the welfare department by darkening him with a burnt stick to hide his light skin. A poignant tale of painful separation, abiding love, and enduring memory.

    The focus of the anthology is on Australian life as seen through each author’s unique, and seldom heard, perspective.With works by Ellen van Neerven, Graham Akhurst, Kyle Lynch, Ezekiel Kwaymullina, Olivia Muscat, Mimi Lee, Jessica Walton, Kelly Gardiner, Rafeif Ismail, Yvette Walker, Amra Pajalic, Melanie Rodriga, Omar Sakr, Wendy Chen, Jordi Kerr, Rebecca Lim, Michelle Aung Thin and Alice Pung, this anthology is designed to challenge the dominant, homogenous story of privilege and power that rarely admits ‘outsider’ voices.

    Woke is a collection of poems by women that reflects the joy and passion in the fight for social justice, tackling topics from discrimination to empathy, and acceptance to speaking out.With Theodore Taylor's bright, emotional art, and writing from Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood, kids will be inspired to create their own art and poems to express how they see justice and injustice.With a foreword by best-selling author Jason Reynolds.

    Martin Rising packs an emotional wallop and, in perfect homage, soars when read aloud." --Booklist, starred reviewIn a rich embroidery of visions, musical cadence, and deep emotion, Andrea and Brian Pinkney convey the final months of Martin Luther King's life -- and of his assassination -- through metaphor, spirituality, and multilayers of meaning.Andrea's stunning poetic requiem, illustrated with Brian's lyrical and colorful artwork, brings a fresh perspective to Martin Luther King, the Gandhi-like, peace-loving activist whose dream of equality -- and whose courage to make it happen -- changed the course of American history. And even in his death, he continues to transform and inspire all of us who share his dream.Wonderful classroom plays of Martin Rising can be performed by using the "Now Is the Time" history and the 1968 timeline at the back of the book as narration -- and adding selected poems to tell the story!

    But you can't. And that's what happened to us.Penguin Bloom tells the true story of Sam Bloom, a young mother whose world is turned upside down after a near-fatal accident leaves her unable to walk. Sam's husband, her three young boys and her mother are struggling to adjust to their new situation when an unlikely ally enters their world in the form of an injured baby magpie they name Penguin. The bird's arrival is a welcome distraction for the Bloom family, eventually making a profound difference in the family's life.

    As a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Fay knows semaphore and Morse code and responds when the soldiers on the ships signal to her. Soon, the soldiers are semaphoring messages for their loved ones, which Fay then telegraphs on their behalf. Although they never meet, Fay eventually becomes friends with one young soldier who has no family. After the soldiers depart for the battlefields of Egypt and Gallipoli, Fay follows their fortunes and continues her long-distance conversations with them through letters and postcards. Drawing on archival material and interweaving fact with fiction, Fay’s tale is based on a true story and brings to life the hardships of those left at home during the war.

    On January 26, no Australian can really look away.'Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, bestselling memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends.In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, beautiful, reflective and troubled book, Australia Day asks the questions that have to be asked, that no else seems to be asking. Who are we? What is our country? How do we move forward from here?

    She dreamed of playing the violin, but with little money for anything but the bare essentials, it was never an option...until a music teacher named Favio Chávez arrived. He wanted to give the children of Cateura something special, so he made them instruments out of materials found in the trash. It was a crazy idea, but one that would leave Ada—and her town—forever changed. Now, the Recycled Orchestra plays venues around the world, spreading their message of hope and innovation.

    Through a series of captivating and sophisticated illustrated stories, Tan explores the precious strangeness of our existence. He gives us a portrait of modern suburban existence filtered through a wickedly Monty Pythonesque lens. Whether it’s discovering that the world really does stop at the end of the city’s map book, or a family’s lesson in tolerance through an alien cultural exchange student, Tan’s deft, sweet social satire brings us face-to-face with the humor and absurdity of modern life.

    It is a profound and delicate disclosure of a subject too often simplified, too often made funny. Funny is included, but the beauty of these tales is in the invisible stitching of erudition and the quite breathtaking emotional understanding of what the weight of the word dislocation means in any human life." Helen Elliott, The Monthly.The Judges' Report for the VPLAThe Fireflies of Autumn is a tough and charming book, with echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino in its blend of the fantastic, the superstitious, the bawdy and the violent. It’s a collection of interconnected stories – novelistic and written with a refreshing, straightforward sense of humour. It is also, in a sly way, a deeply personal but bracingly unsentimental history of migration - of both its burdens and gains. ‘What if,’ one of the narrators notes early on, ‘after a lifetime you still wonder whether you made a monumental, irreparable mistake by emigrating to Australia?’Based largely in the Italian village of San Ginese and broken down into a number of sections, we meet a cast of memorable characters such as Tommaso The Killer, The Angel of Sadness, The Imbecile Daughters and The Adulteress. Moving backwards and forwards in time – from World War I to post-World War II and back again – the chronology is as disjointed as memory and offers a comprehensive portrait of the life not only of a particular village but of a generation of Italians who often endured great hardship, especially during the Mussolini years, and dreamed of better lives in America or Australia. There is a wonderful sense of the complexity of the relationships between family members and the other villagers. A sense, in fact, of the village as a single, constantly evolving organism.======San Ginese is a village where God lingers in people’s minds and many dream of California, Argentina or Australia. Some leave only to return feeling disheartened, wishing they had never come back, some never leave and forever wish they had.The Fireflies of Autumn takes us to the olive groves and piazzas of this little-known Tuscan village. There we meet Bucchione, who was haunted by the Angel of Sadness; Lo Zena, his neighbour, with whom he feuded for forty years; Tommaso the Killer, the Adulteress, the Dead Boy and many others.These are tales of war and migration, feasts and misfortunes – of a people and their place over the course of the twentieth century.

    He believed that all life on earth, and the earth itself, is sacred. A moving and compelling plea for an end to man's destruction of nature.

    Some of our ancestors were driven by dreams and hope. Others came in chains, or were escaping poverty or persecution. No matter what brought them here, each person embodied a unique gift--their art and music, their determination and grit, their stories and their culture. And together they forever shaped the country we all call home.

    Born in 1951, he had a happy childhood — raised by his loving adoptive parents, Bert and Gwen Tickner, in the small seaside town of Forster, New South Wales. He grew up to be a cheerful and confident young man with a fierce sense of social justice, and the desire and stamina to make political change. Serving in the Hawke and Keating governments, he held the portfolio of minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Among other achievements while in government, he was responsible for initiating the reconciliation process with Indigenous Australians, and he was instrumental in instigating the national inquiry into the stolen generations.During his time on the front bench, Robert’s son was born, and it was his deep sense of connection to this child that moved him at last to turn his attention to the question of his own birth. Although he had some sense of the potentially life-changing course that lay ahead of him, he could not have anticipated learning of the exceptional nature of the woman who had brought him into the world, the deep scars that his forced adoption had left on her, and the astonishing series of coincidences that had already linked their lives. And this was only the first half of a story that was to lead to a reunion with his birth father and siblings.This deeply moving memoir is a testament to the significance of all forms of family in shaping us — and to the potential for love to heal great harm.