Author(s): Leonie Agnew

NZ Teen Fiction | Teen Fiction | Staff Picks - Helen

This unpublished manuscript was the winner of the 2022 Tessa Duder Award: a powerful exploration of guilt, forgiveness, choice and personal responsibility.

Hannah Kemp is dealing with a traumatic accident for which she was responsible. Struggling to come to terms with her guilt, she is ostracized in a community that condemns her. She deals with this by rebelling and pushing away anyone that offers kindness or seeks to understand her. Crippled by her own guilt and anger, she comes across a mobile library bus where every book is the true story of someone's life, and realizes that judgement of others is almost always shallow and uninformed. When she finds her own book ... she also finds that her past can reshape her present.