Minds & Bodies

“I started calling myself a disabled woman, and a crip. A good thirteen years after seventeen-year-old me started saying crip, it still horrifies people. I do it because it’s a word that makes me feel strong and powerful. It’s a word other activists have used before me, and I use it to honour them.”

Laureth Peak’s father is a writer. He’s supposed to be doing research in Austria, so when his notebook shows up in New York, Laureth knows something is wrong. On impulse she steals her mother’s credit card and heads for the States. Ahead lie challenges and threats, all of which are that much tougher for Laureth than they would be for any other 16-year-old. Because Laureth Peak is blind.

Francesca is in Year 11 at a new school. She misses her old friends, and her mother has had a breakdown and can barely move from her bed. Does she have the power to bring her family back together?

Year Twelve is not off to a good start for Amelia. Art is her world, but her art teacher hates everything she does; her best friend has stopped talking to her; her mother and father may as well be living in separate houses; and her father is slowly forgetting everything. Even Amelia.

Seventeen-year-old Jean has cerebral palsy and gets around in a wheelchair. Enter Sara, who has radical theories about how people fit into society and is full of rage and revolution against pitying insults and the lack of respect for people with disabilities. Is ten days all it takes to change a life forever?

Riley Rose doesn’t want to be at Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp. But is everything at the Spirit Ranch as it appears? What secrets are waiting for discovery in the abandoned Fraser house? And why doesn’t anyone want to talk about the accident that landed the mysterious Dylan in a wheelchair last year?

Laura Hershey’s poems and essays explore diverse topics including body, nature, community, activism, social justice and more. She is internationally recognised for her activism and advocacy on a wide range of disability rights and social justice issues, and her poem You Get Proud by Practicing is beloved by many in the disability community.

At only nineteen, Justine is the sole carer for her disabled brother, Perry. But with Perry having been accepted into an assisted-living residence, their reliance on each other is set to shift. Before they go their separate ways, they’re seeking to create the perfect memory. But the instability that has shaped their lives will not subside, and the seismic event that Perry forewarned threatens to reduce their worlds to rubble.

When his best friend Hector is suddenly taken away, Standish Treadwell realises that it is up to him, his grandfather and a small band of rebels to confront and defeat the ever-present oppressive forces of the Motherland.

Zara Hagopian is size 22. She has a secret crush on the hottest boy in school, Pablo Fernandex, who has a skinny girlfriend named Holly. Zara hangs out with her best friends Carmelina and Max. They go window shopping in Parramatta and drink hot chocolate in Stockland Mall. Zara learns some of life’s hard lessons when she puts these friendships on the line and goes on a diet to win the boy of her dreams.

Written by the students of Limpsfield Grange School for girls with autism, M is for Autism is a truly authentic coming-of-age novel that shows what it’s really like to grow up feeling a bit different. Why is being normal so easy for everyone else? Will finally getting a label help M to make sense of it all? What does normal even mean anyway?

An anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the ‘fittest’ who survive – it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when everything is lost.