Thunderhead Event - Sophie Beer in conversation with Danielle Binks

Join us as Danielle hosts a very special conversation with Sophie to celebrate Sophie’s first ever middle-fiction novel, Thunderhead. I was lucky enough to be given an advanced copy and it is an absolute cracker! It is definitely one of my favourite reads this year.

About the Author:

Sophie Beer is an award-winning illustrator/author living in Brisbane. She rejoices in creating bright, funny picture books which centre equality, inclusion and kindness. Her books have been printed all over the world and have sold close to one million copies. In 2022 she received a Varuna Writers Space Fellowship to complete her first middle grade novel. When she's not illustrating and writing, she thinks a lot about plants, animals, music, books, equality, and Aldi choc-chip biscuits.

About the Host:

Danielle Binks is a Melbourne-based writer and literary agent with Jacinta di Mase Management. She is the author of bestselling middle-grade book The Year the Maps Changed, and the award-winning young adult books; Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology as well as The Monster of Her Age. Her latest middle grade novel is Six Summers of Tash and Leopold. Danielle also teaches Fiction & Young Adult Writing in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at her alum, RMIT University.

About the Book:

When I listen to music it speaks to me, fills up my soul until I'm bursting with the rainbow-sprinkled, breathless, blush-red joy of being ALIVE.

Meet Thunderhead: awkward, music-obsessed and a magnet for bad luck. Their favourite things in life are listening to records and hanging out with their best (and only) friend Moonflower. But Thunderhead has a big secret. And when Moonflower moves schools, they're faced with the reality of surviving the wilderness of high school alone. Make new friends? NOTHANKYOUVERYMUCH. As two big life events approach, Thunderhead posts playlists and heartfelt diary entries as an outlet to try to make sense of their changing world, to try to calm the storm brewing in their brain and to try to find the courage to unfurl their heart.

Drawing on Sophie Beer's own experience of hearing loss, this indelible illustrated middle grade novel about music, disability, friendship and fandom is immediately engaging, utterly authentic and entirely unputdownable.