If you have read and loved The Grandest Bookshop in the World, then you will be delighted to know that the new prequel is just as good. Before he opened Cole’s Book Arcade, Edward Cole started his bookselling business in the Eastern Market, colloquially called Paddy’s Market. This newest story is set there, and involves Mr Cole and his employee, William Pyke.
Villainous Magnus Maximillian, known as The Obscurosmith, appears again and tries to do a deal with 12-year-old Billy Pyke. However, Billy is warned about the trickery and treachery of the Obscurosmith by his new friend, Kezia Nobody.
The Obscurosmith had promised Kezia that he would tell her who her parents were if she would lend him her ear – and now one side of her head is blank where her ear should have been.
Billy needs to go to work to help support his parents and siblings. He is the eldest and is the one who spends much of his time looking after the family. He can read, write and do magic and doesn’t want to work in the nail factory where his Da works so he applies to Mr Cole’s bookshop.
He is taken on and is good at his job but comes to the attention of The Obscurosmith, who is greatly annoyed when Billy declines his deals. When Billy loses his temper he challenges The Obscurosmith to a duel. How the duel and the puzzles needing to be solved play out is engrossing and clever.
The Bookseller’s Apprentice is another original, fast-paced fantasy with another beautiful cover, this time in cream with gold lettering and detailing.
Reviewed by Lynne Babbage
Age Guide 10+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
It was 1998, my grandpa had some old concrete pipes on his farm, and one day while playing near them, I had a sudden powerful belief that if I jumped off them, I would fly.
I jumped off. I didn’t fly … yet.
But I was airborne for a second, and in my five-year-old mind, that meant it was achievable. At home, I tied together three plastic bags with a piece of wool from Steiner kinder. This was to be my parachute, in case I didn’t get the hang of flying straight away. I put my arms through the parachute straps (more Steiner wool), climbed as far up the cubby-house ladder as I dared – about halfway – and jumped.
Only one second of flying again.
This was going to take a few more tries.
I didn’t fly off the swing set with six plastic bags; the crepe myrtle tree with ten plastic bags; or the top of the slide with 17 plastic bags. I would have gone higher if I could have, with a bigger parachute. However, I had used all the bags in the house by then, and landing was starting to make my feet hurt, and Mum and Dad said that if landing made my feet hurt then that was probably high enough.
But no matter how many times I crashed into the lawn instead of soaring over the rooftops, I would not permit anybody to say I was ‘trying’ to fly. ‘Trying’ implied a possibility of failure. ‘Trying’ invalidated those precious seconds that I was in the air. When they spoke within earshot of me, everyone had to say I was practising.
Becoming a writer was kind of like that, too.
WRITING
It was a goal I set when I was too young to know it was unrealistic. I launched tons of prototypes, and crashed them all – many times, in some cases, and often painfully. And I pursued it with such earnest, stubborn focus that I took all scepticism not as sensible warnings, but as foolishness I hadn’t disproven yet.
Fortunately for my poor little feet, flying lost its gleam after a month or so without progress – but writing never has.
I’ve loved words and books since I was a baby. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was three years old, but I didn’t know writing was an actual job, so I said I wanted to ‘work in a shop surrounded by books that I have written.’ Before I knew how to read, I would ask my parents and relatives to read the same books to me until I memorised them and could recite them to myself.
One of the first things I ever ‘wrote’ wasn’t written at all: it was a one-child play about the untimely demise of my pet chicken, which I solemnly performed with a silk scarf on the back porch for my mum (who got it all on film) and my sisters (who thought the camera was for them).
We moved to the Mornington Peninsula when I was seven, where we had more space, more pets, and when my brother was born, more siblings. I started writing in my free time in Grade Three. By the end of Grade Five, I was writing about ghosts, time travel, monsters and body-swapping on Windows 98 in my dad’s freezing study every night.
As a teenager on the school bus, I wore the letters off the keys of my school laptop writing stories about crab aliens, dark sorcery and interdimensional travel. And of course, I went to Writers’ Club every week, where students gave each other feedback on their work in lunchtime sessions (a great way to get used to editorial feedback early in your career!).
I wrote the middle-school play, The Glass Street Ghost, when I was in VCE. That production was the first time I witnessed the impact of one of my stories. It seemed like a miracle that other people could understand and enjoy something that had once existed only in my head — and I still get that magical feeling whenever people talk about my books.
I majored in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, and I have a Master of Teaching Primary and Secondary from Monash University. I’ve worked as a nanny, tutor, grape-picker, copy writer, teacher and bookshop assistant; and I’ve written at studios at Glenfern in Saint Kilda, and the Old Melbourne Gaol.
Stories of mine have been shortlisted for the Ampersand Prize and the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers’ Contest. I’ve also developed a manuscript through an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship. The Grandest Bookshop in the World was my debut novel in 2020 – but that’s been such an eventful journey that I had to put it on its own page.
After two years living and teaching in Victoria’s Alpine Valley, I now live in Melbourne, in a Neapolitan-ice-cream-coloured flat full of matryoshkas. I love visiting schools and libraries, supporting literary events, and hearing from readers. When I’m not writing, I like to draw, go for walks, and fuss over my garden and my fish tank.
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