What happens to a family when a child goes missing?In a busy street market, Abbie lets go of six-year-old Sarah's hand. She isn't a bad mother, just exhausted. When she turns around, her daughter isn't there.Six years later, Abbie is in love and getting married. But her fragile peace is constantly threatened: not knowing what happened to Sarah is like living with a curse.Then she receives a phone call from an unknown number.A man claims to know what happened to Sarah, but if Abbie tells anyone or fails to follow his instructions, she'll never find out. How far will Abbie go to know the truth? Prize-winning and hugely popular author Vikki Wakefield turns her hand to the psychological thriller in this unputdownable novel that will disturb your dreams!Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for adults and young adults. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl...

Friday Brown is the breathtaking second novel from the author of the award-winning All I Ever Wanted.Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run-running to escape memories of her mother and of the family curse. And of a grandfather who’d like her to stay.She’s lost, alone and afraid. Silence, a street kid, finds Friday and she joins him in a gang led by beautiful, charismatic Arden. When Silence is involved in a crime, the gang escapes to a ghost town in the outback.In Murungal Creek, the town of never leaving, Friday must face the ghosts of her past. She will learn that sometimes you have to stay to finish what you startedand often, before you can find out who you are, you have to become someone you were never meant to be.Vikki Wakefield lives in the Adelaide foothills with her husband and young family. All I Ever Wanted was shortlisted for the Inky Awards, 2011, and was the winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award, Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, 2012.textpublishing.com.au. ‘I don’t know whether it was icy weather or the sheer emotional tension of the story, but the night I stayed up to finish Friday Brown I was shivering. Every single character in this book is utterly fascinating, and their tangled relationships create so much force...Set against an Australian landscape brimming with the gothic, and full of elegaic beauty and intelligent insights into the human mind, this is a stunning contribution to young-adult fiction, and one that will rate as highly memorable among both mature young-adult readers and adults.‘ Bookseller and Publisher‘Each time I read a Vikki Wakefield novel I get this tiny ache in my heart because I‘m already missing her gutsy characters.‘ Melina Marchetta

In this wrenching, mesmerizing coming-of-age novel that Kirkus Reviews calls “lyrical, suspenseful, and haunting,” Friday discovers what makes a family—and how to define home.Friday Brown has never had a home. She and her mother live on the road, always on the move, running away from the past instead of putting down roots. Even when her mom dies, the only thing Friday knows how to do is keep moving. Her journey takes her to an abandoned house where a bunch of street kids are squatting, and an intimidating girl named Arden holds court. Friday gets initiated into the group, but her relationship with Arden is precarious, and it puts Friday—and anyone who befriends her—at risk. With the threat of a dangerous confrontation growing, Friday has to decide between returning to her isolated, transient life, or trying to help the people she’s come to care about—if she can make it out alive.

At seventeen, Jacklin Bates is all grown up. She’s dropped out of school. She’s living with her runawaysister, Trudy, and she’s in secret, obsessive love with Luke, who doesn’t love her back. She’s stuck in Mobius—a dying town with the macabre suicide forest its only attraction—stuck working in the roadhouse and babysitting her boss’s demented father.A stranger sets up camp in the forest and the boy next door returns; Jack’s father moves into the shed and her mother steps up her campaign to punish Jack for leaving, too. Trudy’s brilliant façade is cracking and Jack’s only friend, Astrid, has done something unforgivable.Jack is losing everything, including her mind. As she struggles to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, Jack learns that growing up is complicated—and love might be the biggest mystery of all.Vikki Wakefield's first young adult novel, All I Ever Wanted, won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult...

Everyone knows seventeen-year-old Grace Foley is a bit mad. She's a prankster and a risk-taker, and she's not afraid of anything—except losing. As part of the long-running feud between two local schools in Swanston, Grace accepts a challenge to walk the pipe. That night she experiences something she can't explain. The funny girl isn't laughing anymore. She's haunted by voices and visions—but nobody believes a girl who cries wolf.As she's drawn deeper into a twenty-year-old mystery surrounding missing girl Hannah Holt, the thin veil between this world and the next begins to slip. She can no longer tell what's real or imagined—all she knows is the ghosts of Swanston, including that of her own mother, are restless. It seems one of them has granted her an extraordinary gift at a terrible price.Everything about her is changing—her body, her thoughts, even her actions seem to belong to a stranger. Grace is losing herself, and her friends don't understand. Is...

Rule number one: I will not turn out like my mother.Mim knows what she wants, and where she wants to go. Anywherebut home-in a dead suburb and with a mother who won't get off the couch. Her two older brothers are in prison, so now Mim has to retrieve a lost package for her mother. Does this make her a drug runner? She's set herself rules to live by, but she's starting to break them. And she can't seem to find answers to all the new questions:Why is the monster dog Gargoyle hidden in the back shed?Why is the boy she sent Valentines to for years now suddenly a creep?And who is the mysterious girl next door who moans at night?Over the nine days before her seventeenth birthday, Mim's life turns upside down. In the end, the same things look entirely different.'One of the most memorable YA books I've ever read. Original, real, startling and beautiful.' Cath Crowley, author of Graffiti Moon