Name: The Stars at Oktober Bend
ISBN: 9781910646175

Glenda Millard

Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017, this is a powerful and captivating story about Alice, reaching out to express herself through her beautiful-broken words, and Manny, running to escape his past. Published as a novel for teens, but with writing and themes that reach well beyond those years.

The Stars at Oktober Bend

SHORT-LISTED: 2016 QLD Premier's Literary Awards, Young Adult Books Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone, but something inside her is broken. She has acquired brain injury, the result of an assault, and her words come out slow and slurred. But when she writes, heartwords fly from her pen. She writes poems to express the words she can't say and leaves them in unexpected places around the town. Manny was once a child soldier. He is sixteen and has lost all his family. He appears to be adapting to his new life in this country, where there is comfort and safety, but at night he runs, barefoot, to escape the memory of his past. When he first sees Alice, she is sitting on the rusty roof of her river-house, looking like a carving on an old-fashioned ship sailing through the stars.

The Stars at Oktober Bend

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