The Lastling
By Victor Kelleher
Cover and internal illustrations by Lorena Carrington
ISBN: 9780648815488
220 pages, RRP $19.99
Trim size: 190x128mm
Category: Upper middle-grade fiction
Published May 2025 by Eagle Books, an imprint of Christmas Press
About the book:
It’s a day like any other for Guido, performing his usual duties as a Droid guide in the Wilderness Park, until he receives a shocking warning: human Enforcers are about to eliminate him and all his fellow Droids, on the orders of the supreme leader, Brother John. Desperate to escape, he does a forbidden thing and disobeys a direct order. And that sets in train a chain of consequences that will reach over the years to a human girl named Verne, who’s been hired to break into the home of an old Enforcer and retrieve a mysterious weapon…
What happens next will set both Verne and Guido on the path to discovering the dangerous truth about the world they thought they knew–and forge unexpected bonds between them.
An extraordinary, gripping adventure set in a disturbing future, The Lastling is also a thoughtful, timely exploration of what it means to be human.
About the author:
With many novels to his credit, Victor Kelleher has written successfully for both adults and for young people. Formerly an associate professor of English, he has long since devoted himself full-time to fiction. He is a past winner of the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award, has twice received the CBCA Honour Award, and has either won or been short-listed for many other such prizes, including the Science Fiction Achievement Award and a short-listing for the Carnegie Medal. He currently lives in Tasmania with his artist wife. A previous futuristic novel of Victor Kelleher’s with Eagle Books, Wanderer(2022) was shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, while his adventure novel set in paleolithic times, The Cave, was released by Eagle Books to great acclaim in 2024.
About the illustrator:
Lorena Carrington is an illustrator and writer with a background in fine arts, photography and design. She has worked on story collections, anthologies and picture books, and has also created a number of cover illustrations and designs. Her most recent book, Satin (with text by Sophie Masson) was published in 2023 by MidnightSun Publishing and received a Notable Books listing.Her first book as an author-illustrator, Leaf Letters, was published by Christmas Press in July 2024. Forthcoming in 2025 is The Giant (with text by Sophie Masson), to be published by MidnightSun Publishing. Lorena is the recipient of the 2020 Australian Fairy Tale Society award, for her ‘outstanding contribution to the field of Australian Fairy Tales’ and a May Gibbs Creative Time Fellowship in 2023.
Selected reviews:
Kelleher’s incredible talent and imagination have produced an outstanding exploration of AI, and a view of the results when controlled by a lust for power. This is a superbly crafted novel in four parts, that introduce the passing of time, with two amazing leading characters – one a young orphan girl, the other a Droid, whose paths intersect with life-changing outcomes. (Kids Book Review)
The action is fast-paced, the moves like a chess game, each side trying to outwit the other. At the heart of the story is the question of what makes us human, and when does artificial intelligence cross that line. Can a human and a robot enter a truly caring and trusting relationship? Could we call it friendship, even love? Young readers will find this story totally gripping. It has the same tension as Kelleher’s acclaimed earlier YA books, the futuristic Wanderer (2022) and The Cave (2024) set in the Paleolithic past; all three books share concerns for the natural world, and raise questions about where we are heading. The Lastling is another scary adventure story, but also a warm exploration of friendship between very different kinds of beings. (Read Plus)
The topic of artificial intelligence intrigues us all nowadays. We’ve had stories about robots, cyborgs and androids for many years and The Lastling is a contribution by Victor Kelleher to the literature. With so many ruminations on a topic that is ever-increasingly becoming relevant to us, where does it stand? This is the story of Guido, an android, and a human being called Verne…..It is a book for children who enjoy adventure but it also introduces them to important science fiction and artificial intelligence concepts. We have a robot interacting both with humans and a wild and natural environment: thus, while it may appeal to those who’ve enjoyed The Wild Robot, Guido is also a very quiet and gentle character and we see how the android interacts and grows with Verne, a human. The language brings out this aspect very beautifully…..This book has the elements of a good quest novel — action, adventure, tension, and an unlikely partnership. There aren’t too many twists and turns in the basic plot. What it does make us think about is whether a robot character actually makes the partnership that much different from a human one. The scary part is if the answer is that it doesn’t, not that much. (Buzz Words)
