Cirrus@Austlit

Reading The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon's novel set in a detention centre, is a heightened experience; exquisite for its poetic sensibility and distressing for its bleak setting. In it, the child narrator Subhi's mother, Maá, tells him if everyone would listen to the stories deep down inside the earth, we would hear the whisperings of everything there is to hear, and if everyone did that, then maybe we wouldn't all get stuck so much. (Introduction)

It will come as no surprise to teachers, librarians and parents that children love humour in their fiction reading. On a recent weekly Australian bestseller list, humour was the key ingredient in five of the top ten children's titles with two written by comedians and media personalities, Anh Do and Peter Helliar. Anh Do's latest venture, Ninja Kid, and Helliar's second installment in his Frankie Fish series, were listed second and fifth respectively. When it was released in 2016, UK comic actor David Walliams' The World's Worst Children went straight to No.1 in the Australian children's chart and remained there for three consecutive weeks. Perhaps it is a comedian's ability to tap into the child within or willingness to push the boundaries of gross-out humour or to take advantage of a well-honed imagination that has resulted in these and other publishing success stories?