Rain May and her mum escape their old inner-city life for a dream house in the country. But there are more than a few suprises in store - like discovering a platypus or the fun of fridge poetry and phenomenally bright eleven-year-old, Captain Daniel, who lives next door. Together these unlikely friends adventure where no one has gone before.

Following her parents separation, 12-year-old Rain moves with her mother to the country. There she befriends the unpopular boy who lives next door, and also seeks a way to cope with her feelings toward her father and his new girlfriend.

Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Daniel Whittaker has left some unusual instructions in his will: in order for his three children to get their share of the inheritance, they must hand-deliver twelve letters he has left with his lawyer. What significance did these strangers have to their father? Kelly, the youngest of the three, is intrigued by what they might learn about Daniel. For Richard, however, the exercise seems futile, especially when he has his own secrets to hide. And Evonne is still nursing her grief over her parents' attitude to her sexuality. As Daniel's children carry out his last wishes, each of them must confront their long-held images of their father, and reconsider their relationship with him. What they discover about his legacy will change their lives.

" . . . You are going to be pleasant and helpful, Bee, and not chase Jazzi away. I like Jazzi. I want her to be a permanent fixture in our lives and I don't want any bratty, selfish behaviour from you spoiling things . . . "Since her mother died, it'd been just her, her dad and her guinea pigs, Lulu and Fifi. A perfect, non-nuclear family. Exactly how Bee liked it. Nothing stays the same forever though, and when Jazzi moves in, bringing with her a whole new way of looking at the world and a whole lot of secrets, Bee knows things are going to be completely different from now on.But change can be a scary thing, and when someone reaches out to you, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to take their hand.This heartwarming, humorous and vibrant story from award winning author Catherine Bateson reminds us that love comes in many shapes and sizes . . . . . . even in the form of guinea pigs.

Following on from The Wish Pony, Catherine Bateson's new novel returns to the world of magic realism to chart the stormy waters of a child's grief. When grief strikes, you need an ally. For Mimi, that ally is Ableth, the wildly disobedient blue slave. He comes, he goes, he says and does whatever he likes, but he's always there when Mimi needs him most, offering his own brand of crooked wisdom. Ableth says, 'You need to learn to look under the surface of things. Look at water. It's just a great expanse of blue with little wavelets and riffs of foam. But underneath the surface are whole worlds of wonder. There are treasures and wrecks and bones . . .' But it's hard to look beneath the surface when your Mum is shipwrecked by despair, and you're the only one left to keep things afloat. There's a bric-a-brac shop to run, your first Christmas without a dad, and quite possibly a fugitive taking refuge in your back shed.This warm, captivating story celebrates the odd families we make, as well as those we are born into.