Gillian Rubinstein is a children’s/YA author who was born in England, but moved to Australia in the 1970s. She has written quite a few books, including a children’s picture book, Prue Theroux, The Cool Librarian, about a really cool school librarian. I read it with my two oldest nephews, David and Mark, when they were children. They loved it and read it to their own children. They told me that as far as they were concerned, I was Prue Theroux. Sweet!
But the first novel of hers that I read was Space Demons, in which some children find themselves trapped in a computer game which was brought back from Japan. Some dreadful things happen in the game, as they are angry with each other. There are two sequels, Skymaze and Shinkei. It turns out that it was never meant to be negative; they were getting it all wrong. It was their own behaviour that made the game scary. Space Demons won several awards, including an Australian Children’s Book Council Award.
Galax-Arena featured children who are kidnapped by aliens and taken to another world where they are forced to perform acrobatics for the aliens.
There is a long list of her books in Wikipedia, too long to list them all here, so I will put in a link at the end of this post.
These were books for children, but the Tales Of The Otori series are YA. They are written under the pen name Lian Hearn.
The first of the series, Across The Nightingale Floor, came out in 2002. The main series is made up of five books, but there are other Otori stories, including a free short story in ebook, His Kikuta Hands, which I have just downloaded from Apple Books. You can also get her books on Amazon, including Kindle.
They are set in an alternative universe Japan in the Sengoku era, which was in the fifteenth/sixteenth century. The hero, Takeo, has lost his family, members of a clan known as the Hidden, whom we would think of as ninjas. The premise is that, in this universe, ninja assassins actually do have magical powers. In our world, of course, they were only thought to have magic, because they were very, very good at what they did.
This book is also a prize winner.
Her books have sold in the millions and been translated into forty languages.
They are available in print, ebook and audiobook.
Here is a link to Gillian’s Wikipedia entry, where you can find her full list of publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Rubinstein
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