Nat Luurtsema

I am Lou Brown: Social outcast, precocious failure, 5'10" and still growing. I was on the fast track to the Olympic superstardom. Now, I'm training boys too cool to talk to me. In a sport I just made up. In a fish tank. My life has quickly become very weird. Nat Luurtsema's YA debut is side-splittingly funny and painfully true to anyone who's just trying to figure out how they fit into the world.

A Novel

Goldfish

Keep your enemies close, your family less so... Last year Nat found herself with nowhere to live. She considered sleeping on the bus and washing in the rain but inevitably ended up on her parents' doorstep. It was only for a month, she assured them, if that.. She repeated this phrase a lot over the next six months, while the housing market stagnated like a spoilt kid's fish tank, and her life followed suit. While her friends pursued normal adult lives, Nat was taking packed lunches to gigs and being treated to lectures on 'Why It's Nice When All The Tins Face Forwards In The Cupboard.' ('So we can see what they all are at a glance!') Nat wouldn't say she and those like her were the real victims of the recession, but it would be nice if you did. Then she would do a tiny, brave smile. A book for anyone who's been forced back to the family nest, parents who can't shake off their adult kids, or anyone who's ever excused themselves from a family gathering for a quick scream into a pile of towels.

28 and back home with mum and dad. Living the dream...

Cuckoo in the Nest

Lou Brown's life is going down the pan. Best friend Hannah sailed through the Olympic time trials and is off to her fancy-pants new swim training school, while Lou's own failure to qualify leaves her without a hobby - or a friend. As Lou tries to navigate her post-swim world, a chance encounter with three boys with stars in their eyes takes her life in a surprising new direction. One that leads to a crazy world of underwater somersaults, talent show auditions, bitchy girls and one great big load of awkward boy chat.

Girl Out of Water

"10-year-old Opie Jones is Very Ordinary. In fact nothing remarkable has ever happened to her, if you don't count the cat that gives her funny looks from next door (which she doesn't). So she is naturally very surprised when she is recruited to join The Resistance - a team of superheroes who can read minds, and have a dastardly brainwashing villain to defeat.HOWEVER& it turns out Opie can't read human minds, she can read ANIMAL ones. The other members of the Resistance are very disappointed. And a whole world of animal chat and demands is opening up to her. She's still a superhero, just one on her hands and knees in the mud, chatting to a pedantic worm.But when the brainwashing villain is out to get Opie and her friends, it might just be that listening to all the creatures great and small is what makes Opie Jones the right person to save the world. "-Publisher's website.

Opie Jones Talks to Animals

Poverty sucks. Dad's timing the family's showers and refusing to turn on the heating. Mum has arranged for Lou to get lifts to school with Drippy Dermot and his eccentric mother in the Van of Doom. And lentils seem to feature in every single meal. Lou is still coming down from her brief moment of TV super-stardom and getting to grips with the fact that - hold the news - she has a boyfriend, but with both parents out of work, life isn't all plain sailing. Throw in Hannah's obsession with the school prom, Dads strange shed activity and Lav s brief flirtation with a modelling career, and suddenly training a dance troupe to swim underwater seems like a walk in the park.

Nat Luurtsema

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