This rollicking historical novel from Australian writer Meg Caddy takes us into the world of real-life pirate Anne Bonny, picking up her story where history left off.

A cutthroat and daring new YA release, featuring one of history’s greatest anti-heroines.

As night fell, something stirred the darkness. Birds shrieked, rising into the air as the peace cracked and fell apart. Flashes of crimson uniform cut the smothering black of the woods. The smell of smoke lifted through the boughs and choked the leaves. A drum beat out a steady pulse as soldiers tore over the dead leaf matter, hacking their way through the web of forest. The prisoner ran. When Lowell Sencha finds the strange girl lying as if dead on the riverbank, he is startled to find that she is like them: waer. Human, but able to assume the form of a wolf. The Sencha family’s small community has kept itself sequestered and unnoticed, free from persecution. The arrival of a fellow traveller, and a hunted one at that, threatens their very survival. Sure enough, the soldiers of the blood-purist Daeman Leldh soon descend on the village searching for her, burning and slaughtering. Lowell and the mysterious stranger are among the few to escape. And now they must find their way to the city of Luthan where, she says, they will find people to help them bring down Daeman Leldh. If she can persuade them not to kill her. This brilliant young adult fantasy debut from young Australian writer Meg Caddy sees the emergence of an exciting new talent in speculative fiction.

Dead Man's Chest is a classic pirate yarn that begins with long John Silver's escape from the merchantman Hispaniola at Peurta Plata and culminates with the American Revolution more than a decade later. It describes in rich detail the unholy alliance formed between this soft-hearted cut-throut, his teenage nephew, David Noble, and the slaver-turned-merchant captain, John Paul Jones to retrieve a king's ransom of Spanish gold and jewels from Dead Man's Chest; the other two-thirds of the treasure described in Stevenson's novel, and the inspiration for the sailor's ballad by the same name. Dead Man's Chest explains how the Scottish fugitive John Paul Jones earned a naval commission. More importantly, the novel illuminates a hitherto unknown thirty-month period in John Paul's career. From November 1773 when he killed a mutineer to June 1775 when he received his naval commission in Philadelphia from Thomas Jefferson. Learn how the contract that he and John Silver made with the American founding fathers impacted the lives of the Colonists and ultimately helped win America's freedom from Mother England.