Rain Fall

Author(s): Ella West

NZ Senior Fiction

I'm not running late like I usually am. Maybe that's why I look in the river, maybe that's why I stop when I see it. A dark-coloured raincoat, the arms spread wide, floating, hood-first down the river. And then it starts to rain.


Fifteen-year-old Annie needs to get to her basketball match, but the police have cordoned off her road. Is her neighbour, who she grew up with, still alive? What has he done to have the police after him?


A murder investigation brings new people to Annie's wild West Coast town, including a dark-haired boy riding the most amazing horse she has ever seen. But Annie is wary of strangers, especially as her world is beginning to crumble around her. In setting out to discover the truth Annie uncovers secrets that could rip the small community apart.

It rains all the time in 15-year-old Annie’s West Coast town. But when her neighbour blows up his house and a dead body is found floating in the river, suddenly Annie’s isolated community becomes a hub of excitement. Add in the threatened closure of the mine, with her dad’s job in limbo, a bank robbery in Christchurch and a dangerously attractive new boy in town, and you have all the ingredients for a tense thriller. But Annie is holding on to secrets too.

The gloomy weather adds to the suspense, and Annie’s and Jack’s budding romance, based on a shared love of horses, hits some rocky patches as the story builds to a dramatic climax.

Jack’s participation in rodeos is particularly timely, with animal rights protests against the “sport” currently in the news. Another theme for discussion is the need for renewable energy sources weighed up against the social impact of coal mine closures on small communities. Highly recommended for age 12+

- Ruth

20.00 NZD

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Product Information

New Zealander Ella West and her husband live on a small sheep farm near Dunedin after spending many years on the West Coast. Ella started writing plays for children for the New Zealand School Journal but soon crossed over to fiction and her first teen novel Thieves was published in 2006, the first in a trilogy. Since then she has also written several adult plays including The Middlemarch Singles Ball. She enjoys writing for children and teenagers because anything can happen in a story for children. There's always magic.


Ella was awarded the Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary in 2006, and her novel Night Vision won the 2015 LIANZA Young Adult award and the Young Adult Children's Choice award in the New Zealand Book Awards.

General Fields

  • : 9781760296834
  • : Allen & Unwin
  • : Allen & Unwin Children's Books
  • : 0.22226
  • : October 2017
  • : 198mm X 128mm
  • : Australia
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Ella West
  • : Paperback
  • : 118
  • : English
  • : 823.92
  • : 176
  • : YFB