Christmas Press is delighted to announce that we have acquired world rights in The Lastling, a brilliant new science fiction novel for upper middle-grade readers by multi-award-winning author Victor Kelleher. The novel will be published in April 2025 under the Eagle Books imprint and was acquired via Margaret Connolly of Margaret Connolly and Associates. It follows the author’s Wanderer (2022) which was shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and The Cave (April 2024).

Christmas Press publishing director Sophie Masson said, ‘This is the third novel by Victor that we’ve had the pleasure of acquiring, and we are thrilled to be able to publish his extraordinary new book. With its Android and human protagonists, The Lastling is both an extraordinary adventure set in a disturbing future, and also a timely and thought-provoking exploration of what it really means to be human.’

Guido is an Android whose job it is to guide humans through the Wilderness Park, last remaining tract of unspoiled country, while Verne, a human girl, is a thief, working in the city. When Enforcers are dispatched to eliminate all the Androids, Guido, desperate to survive, does the forbidden thing and disobeys a direct order, triggering dire consequences. Years later, Verne, who knows nothing of Guido, is hired to break into the home of an old Enforcer and retrieve a mysterious weapon. It is then that her and Guido’s stories intersect. What happens next is as compelling as it is unexpected, setting both Verne and Guido on a path that reveals dangerous truths about the world they thought they knew, as well as forging a bond of trust between them, despite their differences.

As to what inspired the novel, Victor Kelleher said: ‘Artificial intelligence, robotics, and the whole notion of the android have been much in the news recently, and rightly so, in light of current technology. Yet underlying this interest is a much longer-standing issue: will AI be friendly to us, or will it threaten our human world? Many novels and films have offered an answer to this question. Some, like the film Terminator, give us two possible answers – AI as both friend and mortal enemy.  So what does The Lastling add to this debate? At one level, like Terminator, it gives two answers, in the forbidding person of Brother John and the gentle figure of Guido. However, it also poses deeper questions. How does an android as gentle as Guido survive in the face of both AI and human aggression? How does he interact with someone as deeply human as Verne? And how does he out-think his own programming? Is such independence on his part even possible? And if so, is he, in some profound sense, also human? Now there’s a scary thought! And it’s that scary thought, more than any other, that inspired me to write this novel.’