I cannot tell you how excited I am that Bea Black has hopped on her broomstick and has flown across the miles from Little Spellshire and soared into Australian bookshops. It is a fantastic first entry in a brand new series that little witches (and wizards) are going to love.

Welcome to Little Spellshire, place of magical children, lots of cats and the new home of Bea Black and her dad. When Bea’s dad accidentally enrols her at the School of Extraordinary Arts - a school for local witches - rather than the school for ordinary kids, Bea finds herself amongst unusual classmates, having to take all manner of spellbinding and enchanting lessons and completing homework tasks that involve venturing into the forest to find skeledrake roots…whatever they are.

‘Two esteemed writers at the height of their powers’ - Bren MacDibble and Zana Fraillon - craft an intriguing, captivating and complex tale of survival and discovery where a future society must pay the heavy price for the indiscretions of those that have walked (and destroyed) the land before them.

Phoenix exists in a world that is being pushed to the brink by excessive consumption, climate change and where an incurable pandemic is about to reek devastating consequences. Shelby Jones and her best friend Davy live in a world that is one-hundred years in the future; post-pandemic, pollution-free, post-city; where government dictates that three-hundred-and-fifty kind and ethical people exist within a fenced-off seven-hundred hectares. It is a simple and low-tech existence; farming, looking after chickens and school lessons to learn how to preserve what they have and to understand a troubling history so that they can avoid the mistakes of the past.