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Tender Morsels

Margo Lanagan    
Format: Paperback - B format
Pages: 396
AUD $19.99 inc. GST
Tender Morsels

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Tender Morsels has won tremendous acclaim around the world. It is fiercely poetic, exquisite and unforgettable. Fantasy at its heart-wrenching best.

Description

Liga's life is filled with dark hearts and foul deeds. So she chooses a protective path of natural magic to find a safe other-worldly place for herself and her two daughters. But when magicked bears and mischief men break the borders of their refuge the girls must face the truth, and engage with the appeal and risk of the real raw world.
Tender Morsels unflinchingly explores the evil and sweetness in the world and the magic of learning to live with both.
'One of my favourite books in ages...powerful and moving.' Neil Gaiman
'Tender Morsels...is funny, tragic, wise, tender and beautifully written. It also left me gasping with shock'. Meg Rosoff
'...a towering work of imagination in which a supremely talented writer opens rich new frontiers.' Sydney Morning Herald
'Give over to the pull of this story and you will be transported.' The Age
'An exquisite novel.' Weekend Australian
'A wonderful and thought-provoking story examining the human condition, set in a world where anything is possible.' Herald Sun
'...a marvel to read and will only further solidify Lanagan's place at the very razor's edge of YA speculative fiction.' Booklist

Awards

Honor Book Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence 2009
Winner (joint) Best Novel World Fantasy Awards 2009
Winner, Ditmar Award, Best Novel 2009
Short-listed, Locus Awards, Young Adult Novel 2009
Honor Book, Tiptree Awards 2009
Short-listed, Shirley Jackson Award for 'literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic
Short-listed, 2008 Aurealis Award, Best Fantasy Novel

Margo Lanagan is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Her three collections of short stories have been rapturously reviewed around the world and have garnered many awards, nominations and shortlistings. Tender Morsels + Black Juice were both Michael L. Printz Honor Books, and Black Juice won two World Fantasy Awards and the 2004 Victorian Premier's Award for Young Adult Fiction. Red Spikes won the CBCA 2007 Book of the Year: Older Readers and was a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Margo lives in Sydney.

ISBN: 9781741758160
Australian Pub.: March 2010
Publisher: ALLEN & UNWIN
Imprint: ALLEN & UNWIN
Subject: Young adult fiction
Edition Number: 1

'... an amazing book. A modern success. A stunning example of language. Very powerful. A future classic. ... Well done to Margo Lanagan the author for daring to write such a book, and to the publishers for daring to publish it.' - read the rest of this review at the Guardian

Reader reviews

'Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, is unnervingly satisfying. Both grotesquely confronting and beautifully poetic, the novel asks the reader to consider the price that one must pay for having heaven on earth - what could possibly be wrong with feeling nothing but serene contentment? Can there be a heaven on earth without a hell?

The reader will be enchanted by the eclectic array of characters, from the persistently endangered yet eternally ungrateful and foul-mouthed dwarf, to the powerful yet fallible witch, to the enamoured human bear, to the unknowing yet overwhelmed protagonist.

Like the witches in her story, Lanagan seems to possess natural magic as she easily toys with the reader’s emotions. Just like the protagonist, Liga, the reader is never fully at ease even in the tenderest moments in the heavenly world - there is always the lingering threat of a violent and tragic intrusion. No stone is left untouched in the highly emotive telling, as even the landscape itself comes alive in evocative and sometimes haunting detail, from a mysterious town that looks ‘like a grandmother’s teeth, half the houses missing’, to the foreboding silence ‘that streamed at her in its disguise of hissing leaves and bird-cry’.

This is not a cartoon fairytale to read before drifting off to sleep at night. Tender Morsels will have the reader on tenterhooks from the first page to the very last.' - Elizabeth Sim

'Readers beware - this book will stretch and work your imagination, take you to another world and push your senses to the limit.

Tender Morsels is a novel that is raw, original in its storyline, powerful, exquisitely written, a struggle to read at times but an absolute must-read for all fantasy lovers. Set within two worlds and dealing with the thin boundary between both, the tale will keep readers transfixed to the plot and characters. At times the characters even seem to jump from the page - so dimensional and well-written is the dialogue, descriptions and interactions between them all. Mind you it is not for the faint-hearted. So intertwined is the plot and the dialogue is so perfectly created to fit the 'worlds' it does take your concentration. But it is so well worth it. Enjoy and allow yourself to explore the interesting questions it asks about good and evil and the balance of both.' - Michele Perry

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