We’re excited to be giving away two copies of The Hatchling by Suzanne Main to our GrownUps members!
To be in the draw, simply make sure you’re a GrownUps member, signed up to our newsletter, and fill in your details at the bottom of the page.
About The Hatchling
Award-winning children’s book author Suzanne Main releases her much-anticipated third junior fiction novel!
Something is making a racket in the attic!
Since the mysterious disappearance of their parents, Willow and Hunter have been living with their grandfather in his creaky old house. But Grandpa’s memory is fading fast, and the twins dread the prospect of being placed into foster homes.
Willow can barely sleep for the worry, not to mention the crashes coming from the locked attic. But the close-knit twins are on the cusp of an extraordinary discovery. One that will draw a series of strangers into their lives, both sinister and surprising. As a super blood moon approaches, the pair will be propelled on a hair-raising adventure that pushes their relationship beyond breaking point and challenges everything they’d believed to be true.
The Hatchling is a gripping, fast-paced adventure story brimming with fantastical characters. But most of all it’s about family, the joy of belonging, and the importance of finding your way home.
Author Note
‘The idea for this book came about when I was doing the Whitireia Diploma of Creative Writing. We had to come up with an idea for a children’s story and plot it out. I had written two children’s books previously, but I fell in love with the story idea I conceived of and decided after the course to progress it.
The story begins when siblings realise something is making noises in their locked attic. I adore the idea of dusty, forgotten spaces filled with old treasures and what you might find there (which is bizarre since I hate dust and mess in real life!). I love to write larger-than-life, madcap characters and situations, and this book gave me lots of opportunity to do that.
It was a lot of fun but that doesn’t mean it is without themes or research. As the book progressed a couple of themes emerged. The first was about human ownership and the keeping or exploiting of animals. The second and more dominant is about making difficult choices for which there is no right or easy answer. Dilemmas can be tricky to write for children, as often situations get distilled down for them into black and white, right or wrong, but life is rarely like that.
Much of the story action happens in an archipelago, so I researched how large these can be. Whilst I would have loved to set the book in NZ, there wasn’t an appropriate real-life setting here I could use. I also researched rare astronomical events as a super blood moon is the catalyst for some of what happens. I needed an event that sometimes happens quite close together and then not again for a long time.’
About the Author
Suzanne Main was born in Wellington and now lives in Island Bay, after a number of years living in Australia and the UK. She has two children. In 2011, Suzanne Main completed the New Zealand Writers’ College Introduction to Creative Writing. This was followed up by a weekend novel-writing course where the idea for her first novel, How I Alienated my Grandma, was born, which won the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award in 2014. It was a children’s choice finalist in the 2015 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and is a Storylines Notable Book.
Suzanne’s follow-up novel, How Not to Stop a Kidnap, was released by Scholastic NZ in 2017. It is also a Storyline Notable book (2018) and was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2018. In 2021, Suzanne’s first two novels were optioned for film by Whitebait Media.
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You must be a GrownUps member and subscribed to our newsletter to be eligible to enter.
The competition closes on 10th September 2025. Winners will be notified via email by 11th September 2025.
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