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Old Barn Books lands hopeful novel from Australian duo Fraillon and MacDibble
Old Barn Books has landed The Raven’s Song, a "unique" middle-grade novel by Zana Frallion and Bren MacDibble.
Publisher Ruth Huddleston acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada and ANZ), from Safar El-Ouahabi and Claire Wilson at RCW. The Australian edition will be published by Allen & Unwin. The Raven’s Song, for readers aged 10+, will be published in October 2022.
"I was so excited to discover that Bren and Zana had collaborated on a new novel," said Huddleston. "I’m a big fan of Zana’s writing and, of course, of Bren’s and their strong voice and powerful storytelling mesh so well. It’s a great adventure with a big heart and plenty of food for thought."
Author of How to Bee (Old Barn Books), MacDibble is a two-time nominee for the Carnegie Medal and three-time winner of New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year. Fraillon is the author of The Bone Sparrow (Hachette Children’s) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Book Prize and Carnegie Medal and won the Amnesty CILIP Honour Award. Now the two unite for The Raven’s Song which aims to offer a "vision of hope for the future".
Following alternate timelines, the novel focuses on Phoenix who lives in a near future world impacted by climate change and a "devastating" pandemic and Shelby, 100 years in the future in a post-pandemic, post-pollution, post-city world. "The Raven’s Song is a vision of hope for the future, seen through the eyes of the young people who will fight for it," Old Barn Books wrote.
Fraillon commented: "Our writing experiment was a dream run until Covid hit. We looked at the book we had been writing and at the world unfurling in an eerily similar fashion and had to ask ourselves how could we possibly bring a book about a pandemic into a world being thrown horribly off course by a pandemic? But The Raven’s Song is a story of finding hope and strength in an impossible situation and of seeing yourself existing in a deep time that extends beyond the life you live."
MacDibble added: "Some books begin in the strangest of places. For The Raven’s Song, that place was Twitter. Zana had been picking the brains of the Twitter book folk, and my suggestion of a ruined future city, set us both off on a trail of rambling what ifs. We had the story plotted, the characters developed and a whole bunch of possible endings worked out all on Twitter DMs within a few days of messaging each other."
