The Raven's Song

NOW IN PAPERBACK: A heart-stopping collaboration between two award-winning Australian authors

Runner-up (Honour Book) Children’s Book Council Australia Book of the Year 2023

Shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards and Western Australia Premier’s Prize 2023

Buy on this site or here. Teacher's notes available to download here.

Read an extract here and read BellisdoesBooks Q and A with the authors here

The first dual-voice teen novel from acclaimed authors Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble.

 The Raven's Song alternates between the stories of Phoenix, who lives in a near-future world impacted by climate change and a devastating pandemic; and Shelby, one hundred years in the future in a post-pandemic, post-pollution, post-city world where each community is exactly three hundred and fifty people sustainably subsisting on seven hundred hectares.

In Phoenix's contemporary urban world, climate change and pollution have distorted weather systems and infected children are being cryogenically frozen to give the government enough time to find a cure that will save them. This is only supposed to take a few years, at most: meanwhile each child has a box put together for them with all their favourite things, so their families can talk and read to them, and so they can have them close by when they wake up. Among the infected children is Phoenix – his box contains a seed journal as well as a collection of letters to no one.

In Shelby's future world, she finds the forgotten children in an abandoned city when she ventures out from her rural egg farm. The batteries are degenerating, and the children will die unless she wakes them. But when Phoenix is awoken, danger returns. The children will have to work together to locate a cure, and find a way to a better future.

Watch Bren and Zana read from the book, talk about their remote collaboration – and set you a collaborative writing exercise, on our Youtube video https://youtu.be/iEX-xdlASnY

Press: download the press release here or contact liz@lizscottpr.co.uk for further information

Format: HB; jacketed; 198 x 128mm; 288pp; £12.99; ISBN: 9781910646816

Available in paperback from September 2023: ISBN 9781910646854

Age range: 9/10 - 13/14 years