The Simple Things

In this tender story of lives lived and others barely begun, we see how much the young can learn from the elderly, and vice-versa. It addresses themes of growing up, growing old, and all that’s in between presented in Bill Condon’s unique, natural and pure style.

Stephen and his parents go to visit their elderly Aunty Lola in the country. Apart from two cards a year containing ten dollars, Stephen has little knowledge about this relative he’s never met.

 Aunty Lola and Stephen don’t hit it off at first. She scowls, constantly corrects his English, and doesn’t know what diplomacy means. But as he gets to know her, he finds that she’s not so bad, she simply expresses herself in a different way.

Aunty Lola opens up her box of life to Stephen whom she quickly grows to love.  She reveals secrets about painful experiences, and they both learn that life is full of simple things to share while creating memories to treasure a lifetime.

The young, innocent narrative voice of Stephen is as smooth as flowing chocolate and equally as tasteful. Bill Condon’s extraordinary ability to create convincing characters and capture their thoughts and speech perfectly is at work again within this well-crafted storyline.

Reviewed by Anastasia Gonis

Title: The Simple Things

Author: Bill Condon

Illustrator: Beth Norling

Publisher: Allen & Unwin PB RRP $12.99

Publication Date: Feb 2014

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781743317242

Type: Children’s Fiction

Confessions of a Liar,

Thief and Failed Sex God

by Bill Condon

Woolshed Press. Australian, Young Adult. Paperback rrp $18.95

Neil Bridges is a 16-year-old Catholic school boy who doesn’t know what he wants to do or where he wants to go. It is 1967 and the all-boy’s school he attends is run by teachers and priests who believe that a leather strap is the best way to learn manners, mathematics and the right way to being a better person. His strict but loving parents are hard-working and try to bring up Neil and his older brother, Kevin, as good Catholics.

What Neil wants is to grow up. But there are too many distractions. The girls in the girl’s school next door, his brother leaving for service in Vietnam, and the loss of his best friend.

When Neil loses his best mate in a strange accident, he doesn’t know where to turn. He is confused and angry. When he starts to form an alliance with a boy that was expelled from his school, indirectly due to Neil not telling the truth, his life starts to take an upward turn.

Bill Condon has written a book that is universal in time – set 40 years ago, it is equally relevant today. I guarantee you cannot put this one down. I read it in one sitting. More than the confessions of a teenage boy, it is a record of the journey into adulthood. Sometimes that journey seems so fast, it’s in danger of spinning out of control.

Bill Condon’s Dogs (2001) and No Worries (2005) were Honour Books in the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Awards. No Worries was also short-listed for the Ethel Turner Prize in the 2005 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Daredevils made the long-list in the inaugural Inky Awards.

The Reading Stack reviewed Bill Condon’s Daredevils in Issue 1 and Give Me Truth in Issue 14.

Author Bill Condon Wins Award

Bill Condon has won the $100,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for young adult fiction for Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God, about a student at a Catholic boys' school in 1967. The judges said the book was a ''poignant, funny and deeply insightful rite of passage novel...The pain of first love and the ...morality attached to individual life choices is made contemporary in a work praised by the judges as one of tremendous honesty and integrity.''

The Reading Stack reviewed Bill's book Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God in October 2009.