Hachette Australia has acquired ANZ and UK rights to a new middle-grade novel from Danielle Binks in a two-book deal, via Jacinta di Mase Management.

Publisher Kate Stevens acquired upper middle-grade standalone novel Six Summers of Tash and Leopold, ‘a gently suspenseful story with a big heart, that sees an unlikely friendship form between two 12-year-old neighbours as they try to solve two mysteries in their suburb’.

Says Stevens: ‘Six Summers of Tash and Leopold is for fans of Danielle’s bestselling The Year the Maps Changed. But it’s also for anyone who enjoys a big, hopeful coming-of-age middle-grade book, that features complicated families and life-changing summers. It’ll have you by the heartstrings from the opening page. I’m so impatient to get it into readers’ hands; I feel like it’s exactly what everyone needs right now.’

Binks’s 2020 novel The Year the Maps Changed will debut in North America with the HarperCollins imprint Quill Tree Books in October 2022, in a deal negotiated by Annabel Barker. Polish translation rights have been sold to publisher Widnokrąg, via Kamila Kanafa at Macadamia Literary Agency.

The Monster of Her Age, Binks’s second novel, won the YA category in the 2022 Indie Book Awards.

Six Summers of Tash and Leopold will be published in September 2023. The following novel is scheduled for release in 2024.