The best selling Ash Road is an action-packed adventure story, so evocative of rural Australia you can taste the Eucalyptus.

It's hot, dry and sweaty on Ash Road, where Graham, Harry and Wallace are getting their first taste of independence, camping, just the three of them. When they accidentally light a bushfire no one would have guessed how far it would go. All along Ash Road fathers go off to fight the fires and mothers help in the first aid centres. The children of Prescott are left alone, presumed safe, until it's the fire itself that reaches them. These children are forced to face a major crisis with only each other and the two old men left in their care.

Ivan Southall was the first Australian author to receive the Carnergie Medal, and was awarded the Australian Children's Book Council Book of the Year on three occasions. An icon of Australian children's literature, he wrote over sixty books in his lifetime and has been published in twenty-three different countries. He died in 2008.