Ruth Park was born in New Zealand but is widely claimed as one of Australia’s defining authors. She moved to Sydney as an adult and her descriptions of the post-war inner-city slums which she herself experienced, captured the essence of the city. Her children’s books blended fantasy and humour and in Playing Beatie Bow 14-year-old Abigail travels back a hundred years in a scary game and becomes involved with a shopkeeper’s family.

I have been addicted to stories about time travel ever since I first read this classic children’s book in the early eighties. I was the same age as the teen protagonist and I loved the fact that it was set in my home-town of Sydney. Such was the power of the writing that I truly felt as if I experienced colonial times. I often think of that fierce little girl, Beatie Bow, as if she were someone I once knew.

Since her mother’s boyfriend moved in Pip feels she must hide in her room. Home isn’t fun anymore and instead she sits by the waterhole at dusk and remembers her best friend Mika. When she finds a half-dead creature at the waterhole, Pip is filled with new purpose to save this small dragon and determined to return it to where it comes from. A beautiful tale of love and survival.

The nightly bedtime story had faded from our routine and I was worried my young daughter wasn’t reading for pleasure. I suggested we read this book out loud to each other a page at a time. We both became immersed in this truly exquisite, heartbreaking story about a mother and daughter, a baby dragon and so much more. We both cried at the end. It’s a magical memory of a magical book.

Jane Harper commanded the nation’s fiction scene in 2017 with her debut novel The Dry, a rural crime thriller deeply entwined in the harsh Australian landscape and then continued to write bestsellers. In The Lost Man two brothers meet at a decades’ old stockman’s grave on the border of their vast cattle ranches and find a fresh corpse – their middle brother Cameron. How did he get here and how did he die?

The Australian outback is an integral part of our identity and folklore. I say this but I’ve lived my whole life in coastal suburbs and only experienced the outback through the words of talented Australian writers like Jane Harper. I read this compelling novel in Norway, but I could taste the gritty red dust and feel that extraordinary dry heat. It was a shock to look up and see a snowy landscape outside my window.