Hester Hitchins and the Falling Stars by Catherine Norton
2025 Longlist - CYA Category
About Catherine Norton
Catherine Norton's first novel, Crossing, was joint winner of the Patricia Wrightson Prize in the 2015 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. It was also a CBCA Notable Book. She was born in the UK but grew up mostly in Adelaide, where she lives with her husband, children and a very lazy whippet called Archer. She has had dozens of jobs, including travel agent, cleaner, packer of tulip bulbs and novelty stationery, publishing assistant and academic, but she has only ever been fired from two of them. Writing novels is by far her favourite.
About Hester Hitchins and the Falling Stars
It's 1866 and Hester Hitchins' father is missing at sea.
Determined to find him, eleven-year-old Hester wins a place at Addington's Nautical Navigation Academy, where she will learn to navigate by the stars. But the academy is just for boys, and what's more, no one seems to be in charge.
Bumbling schoolmaster Captain Slingsby doesn't know anything about navigation. Lord Addington is obsessed with building the world's biggest telescope and Lady Addington believes that falling stars are the souls of the dead.
With the help of a lodestone, her new friends Pru and Nelson, and a dazzling meteor storm, can Hester set things right - and find her own place in the universe?
