Pam Macintyre

Todd and the unforgettable Manchee, a dog that can ‘talk to yer’, live in a world where thoughts are audible, in the original, futuristic The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking Trilogy Book One (Walker Books), by Patrick Ness. It is an unpredictable, page-turner of a book. James Moloney’s frank and shocking, but never gratuitous, Kill the Possum (Penguin) tackles family abuse and the resulting tragedy when, with the best intentions, a naïve adolescent boy intervenes. Gentle and spare, with a terrific boy at its centre, James Roy’s Hunting Elephants (Woolshed Press) gets beneath Harry’s assumptions to the unexpected realities in the hearts and minds of his family. Chris Wheat’s Screw Loose (Allen & Unwin) is the real deal: an hilarious Australian young adult novel. My favourite moment: when the keen-to-please principal announcing Gay Week outs two students to the assembled school.

Nigel Pearn

The problem is not being unable to find a quality picture book, but what type of picture book, for what purpose and for whom! At the young end of the spectrum it is a very CBCA Christmas this year. Aaron Blabey’s Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley (Viking) and Margaret Wild and Ann James’s Lucy Goosey (Little Hare), are books that chart the terrors of childhood. Lucy Goosey is the more substantial tale with dense and evocative language. PB and CP is sweet but truthful, and the illustrations have a mettle that children love. Any tome that premises itself on a protective frog and has multiple ‘gobble’ pages is always going to get my vote. The high aesthetic and fairytale intertextuality of William Bee’s Beware of the Frog (Walker Books) makes it my international choice. Finally, to Tohby Riddle’s Nobody Owns the Moon (Viking): a Riddle book is never the big kapow, but they seep under the skin and stick in the mind and you will find yourself thinking about a fox called Clive Prendergast at the oddest moments. This is a book that provokes reflection and conversation. Like any quality fable, the reader is the limit, not the text.

Stephanie Owen Reeder

Aaron Blabey’s Sunday Chutney (Penguin), an idiosyncratic look at the pitfalls and pleasures of moving house, is engaging fun. Glenda Millard and Stephen Michael King’s Apple-sauce and the Christmas Miracle (ABC Books) – a heart-warming tale about drought, bushfires and the true meaning of Christmas – is presented with a soupçon of pathos and a large helping of gentle Australian humour. Graeme Base’s Enigma: A Magical Mystery (Viking) has codes to break, hidden images, exotic animals and locations, and a sumptuous artistic style. The very oriental Wabi Sabi (Little, Brown), by Mark Reibstein and Ed Young, a tale of a cat’s search for self, uses superbly designed collage illustrations, and a combination of poetic prose and haiku. It is a stunning work of art.

Ruth Starke

The fifteen illustrated stories in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia (Allen & Unwin) inhabit a territory which lies somewhere between everyday normality and Absurdistan; they delight, enchant and mystify in equal measures. Tohby Riddle’s Nobody Owns The Moon is a whimsical tale about a fox transported by the magic of theatre and a big city, and a captivating picture book for all ages. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown), about a boy’s attempts to escape a life of social and intellectual deprivation on an Indian reservation, is told with self-deprecation and cartoon humour, but delivers its punches with knockout force. The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness, is a futuristic frontier story of pursuit that never lets go: simply unputdownable.