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UQP acquires Melanie La'Brooy's first children's title, The Wintrish Girl
Posted 04.05.2022

UQP acquires Melanie La'Brooy's first children's title, The Wintrish Girl

UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired ANZ rights for the first book in Melanie La’Brooy’s wildly fun Talismans of Fate middle-grade fantasy series, The Wintrish Girl.

UQP Publisher Clair Hume says: ‘Melanie La’Brooy is a creative dynamo and her debut children’s fiction crackles with energy. The Wintrish Girl is a complete page turner, deftly balancing big themes with fantastical world-building and adventure. Add in a fierce female lead and perfectly timed jokes and this book has something for all middle-grade readers.’

Melanie La’Brooy says: ‘All good fantasy should offer readers a glimpse into the workings of our own world. As a lifelong politics nerd, writing The Wintrish Girl allowed me to dive into issues of race, power, and gender. At the same time, I plotted impossible escapes, invented a Librarynth (a cross between a library and a labyrinth) and made some excellent jokes about cheese. The hero of the Talismans of Fate series is a brown-skinned girl named Penn. She begins her adventures believing that her destiny is determined by others and irreversible, but then takes her fate into her own hands. Writing this book has given me so much joy. I hope that The Wintrish Girl makes readers laugh and maybe even learn valuable life lessons about friendship, siblings and how to escape from an invincible prison tower.’

About the book

On Talisman Day in the Province of Arylia, all children receive powerful objects that change their lives forever. All children except for the Wintrish servant girl Penn, that is.

Bound to the spoiled Princess Seraphine since birth, Penn has never known her true family. While she longs to return to her own Province of Midwinter and find them, she knows that all her future holds is a lifetime of loneliness.


But a long-forgotten evil is stirring, and destinies are about to change …

When the Princess is kidnapped, Penn is forced to run for her life to clear her own name. With the help of some unexpected friends and a dragon with a fear of unicorns, she faces deadly peril and formidable foes. Can one ordinary Wintrish girl save the day?

Because without a Talisman, there’s no changing your fate – is there?

About Melanie La’Brooy

Melanie La’Brooy is an Australian author who has previously written five novels for adults (Love Struck, The Wish List, Serendipity, The Babymoon and Bittersweet), that were published in Australia by Penguin Books and internationally. For several years, Melanie regularly contributed political columns to The Age and did book reviews on ABC Local Radio Melbourne. Over the past twelve years she has lived in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East with her family.

The Wintrish Girl will be published in September 2022.