Glyn Harper’s and Maria Gill’s latest books are both part of the final year of publishing in commemoration of the centenary of WWI. Bobby the littlest war hero, for 4- to 8-year-old children, is about a canary in the tunnels during WWI, who was used to alert tunnellers to the build-up of dangerous gases, saving their lives. Anzac Animals is for 8- to 12-year-olds, featuring 20 stories about animals that went to war, including mascots and working animals from WWI and WWII. Mar

Anzac Day brings with it a fever pitch of publishing of war books for both children and adults. This has been especially true during the centenary commemorations of World War I. People are horrified by war, but also fascinated, and it is important for everybody to know some history: to understand what has happened, what is happening, and why. So we can find a solution. As Melinda Szymanik noted in her recent article, 'War! What Is It Read For?': ‘War books are an opportunity

Our editor Jane Arthur comes out from behind the curtain to interview the multi-accoladed Australian children’s writer Ursula Dubosarsky, whose latest novel The Blue Cat is out now. Ursula Dubosarsky made me an evangelist at first read. It was The Red Shoe, and it was like nothing else I’d read in children’s literature. It’s ‘about’ a lot of things, including life in mid-century Australia and the threat/romance of Communist spies, hydrogen bombs and polio, but it’s also hypno

Author Melinda Szymanik considers war books for children, how they create deeper empathy, and tells us what writers balance as they write these books. Every year, amongst the latest batch of published stories for children about superheroes, horses, dogs and cats, adventure, wizards, dragons, dinosaurs and dystopias, there are always books about war. The last three years have seen an increase in the number of such books as we commemorate the centenary of World War One, and thi

An excerpt from David Hill's Flight Path, a YA novel about 18-year-old Jack who wanted to escape boring little New Zealand – but soon finds that flying in a Lancaster bomber to attack Hitler's forces brings terror as well as excitement. In the Ops Room, men yawned, rubbed eyes bleary with tiredness and red where oxygen masks had chafed. There was laughing, hand-shaking, back-slapping. Julian patted his crew’s shoulders, saying ‘Wizard show, chaps, what-ho?’ Two aircraft were