But once I started, I found you could have fun with her: she could tell lies, she could deny the truth.' Whereas most children know 'only what adults want them to know,' the author discovered she could bypass that limitation by 'turning Harper into an eavesdropper and giving her older siblings to reveal realities.' 'I found her difficult to approach,' she admits. Once the dual ideas of the boy who tunneled and the young girl as narrator gelled, it almost wrote itself-I had the cast, I had the setting, I just said 'go.' ' Accustomed to writing about edgy young adult characters, Sonya Hartnett says that identifying with a seven-year-old protagonist was a challenge at first. 'I'd wanted to set a story in the Depression for some time, in an isolated community that was strongly supportive. 'It just pulled itself together,' she says. The acclaimed author of several award-winning young adult novels-the first written when she was just 13-Australian native Sonya Hartnett says she wrote THURSDAY'S CHILD in a mere three months. Even I, who like to distance myself from my characters, felt protective of her.' 'Harper is the reason you get sucked into the characters. 'I chose to narrate the story through a child because people like children, they WANT to like them,' says Sonya Hartnett of THURSDAY'S CHILD, her brilliantly original coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. Her novels have been published traditionally as young adult fiction, but her writing often crosses the divide and is also enjoyed by adults. Her books have also been published in Europe and North America. She wrote her first novel at the age of thirteen, and had it published at fifteen. Redfern) is, or was, something of an Australian child prodigy author.

Sonya Hartnett (also works under the pseudonym Cameron S.

Thursday's Child by Sonya Hartnett