Book Week: Tigg and The Bandicoot Bushranger by Jackie French

Orphaned twelve-year-old Tigg is the Bandicoot Bushranger, the youngest bushranger on the Ballarat goldfields in 1859. When a robbery goes wrong, Tigg must flee in disguise as one of the tens of thousands of Chinese men and boys braving heat, thirst, starvation and murderous attacks on the long road from Robe in South Australia to the goldfields in Victoria. But even further danger threatens. Who has offered a large sum of money for Tigg's capture? And is the mysterious Henry Lau a friend or enemy? To be safe, Tigg must solve the greatest mystery of all. Who is Tigg?

Japan has bombed Sydney Harbour. Sixteen-year-old Ossie lies about his age to protect his country, even though it means abandoning his only family, a one-eyed dog named Lucky. Kind-hearted Mrs Plum is already looking after forty-six dogs belonging to soldiers who've gone to war. She can't possibly care for another. But just when she's becoming desperate to find a way to feed them, help arrives: thirteen-year-old Kat Murphy volunteers to care for Lucky and persuades the girls at school to help, too. As Kat and Lucky grow closer, Kat realises he can still see Ossie, the master he loves. And somehow, Kat and Ossie catch glimpses into each other's lives, too. This extraordinary connection helps Ossie survive when he is taken as a prisoner of war to Japan. There, he witnesses a strange mushroom cloud rise above Nagasaki, the result of a bomb that will take, save and change lives, and forever leave the question: was it worth it?

The war carried the Spanish flu across the world. Faces grew masks. Shops and schools wore signs that said, 'Closed'. Families nursing the sick drew their curtains together to say their house was quarantined...

In 1917 sixteen-year-old Jean McLain is working as a Post Office assistant in England. But when she wins a national Morse code competition, the British army makes a request Jean cannot refuse – to take a secret position as a signaller in France.

'Historical fiction at its best' It's 1939 and George is the son of an English father and German mother. When a ceremony turns into a pro-Nazi demonstration, Georg is smuggled to London in a suitcase, and then across the seas to Australia, to begin a life under a different name and with a new family, in order to survive.