NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TONI COLLETTE AND HUGO WEAVING
Summer, 1965.
Late one night, thirteen-year-old Charlie Bucktin is startled by a knock on his window.
His visitor is Jasper Jones. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is intriguing. And he needs Charlie's help. In the dead of night, the boys steal through town, and Charlie learns of Jasper's horrible discovery.
Burdened by a terrible secret and the weight of a town's suspicion, Charlie feels his world closing in.
After this summer nothing will ever be the same again.
Craig Silvey grew up on an orchard in Dwellingup Western Australia. He now lives in Fremantle, where at the age of 19, he wrote his first novel, Rhubarb, which received the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award. In 2007, Silvey released a picture book called The World According to Warren. His most recent novel, Jasper Jones, was shortlisted for the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Award.
Outside of literature, Silvey is the singer/songwriter for the band The Nancy Sikes.
Terrific...this is an enthralling novel that invites comparison with Mark Twain and isn't found wanting. Silvey is able to switch the mood from the tragic to the hilarious in an instant
Mail on Sunday
Catcher in the Rye meets To Kill a Mockingbird in a novel that confronts racism, injustice, friendship and the tenderness of first love - as seen by bookish, guileless, 13-year-old Charlie Bucktin, led astray by the intriguing, dangerous eponymous outcast, Jasper Jones
Easy Living
A finely crafted novel that deals with friendship, racism and social ostracism... Saluting To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Silvey movingly explores the stifling secrets that lurk behind the most ordinary of facades
Marie Claire
Jasper Jones is a well-paced, eminently readable bildungsroman... The exultation contained in the description of a cricket game featuring Charlie's irrepressible best friend is enough alone to earn this book sentimental-classic status.
The Monthly
Impossible to put down ... There's tension, injustice, young love, hypocrisy ... and, above all, the certainty that Silvey has planted himself in the landscape as one of our finest storytellers.
Australian Women's Weekly