Jasper Jones

Teacher Resource

Publisher's synopsis

Full of unforgettable characters, a page-turning pace and outrageously good dialogue, this is a glorious novel – thoughtful, funny, heartbreaking and wise – about outsiders and secrets, and what it really means to be a hero.

Late on a hot summer night in the tail-end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.

And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

Awards

Winner, National Year of Reading 2012, Western Australia
Overall Winner, Indie Book of the Year Award 2009
Winner, Indie Book of the Year 2009 – Fiction
Winner, ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Book of the Year 2010
Winner, ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2010
Winner (joint), 2009 Western Australia Premier’s Literary Award – Fiction
Finalist, 2010 Sydney Morning Herald 2010 Best Young Novelist
Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award 2010
Shortlisted, 2010 NSW Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for fiction
Shortlisted, 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

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Craig Silvey

Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Jasper Jones was the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for 2010. Craig’s third novel Honeybee was published in 2019 and won Best Fiction for the Indie Book Awards 2021 and Dymock’s Book of the Year 2020.

Photo courtesy of Allen & Unwin

If we see a more entertaining, heartfelt piece of Australian literature in the next 12 months, it will be a rare year indeed – an Australian To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Monthly

Further Details

Author Craig Silvey

Publisher Allen & Unwin

Date of Publication 2009

ISBN 9781760295929

Category Novels

SCIS number

5470788

Pages

408