The summer Ned Kelly lived with the bees was extraordinary, to say the very least. It began as he lay in his hospital bed and looked up to see a lovely dark and gold creature on the window sill gazing at him with pitying eyes. Swallowing the drop of golden liquid Apis the Bee offered, Ned became just the right size to travel on her back if he held on tightly to her armour. Apis was a worker who took things easier than most, claiming that bees didn't know how to relax. She stopped off between chores to listen to the serials on the radio like 'The Search for the Golden Boomerand' (for this was Australia) and she had even taught Selma, the queen of her hive, to speak radio language, so Ned had no trouble understanding either of them. Ned was filled with wonder on entering the hive, which was like a huge apartment building and factory in one. Nancy Clancy, another human child of insect size, shared her room with Ned and, aside from her habit of speaking in rhyme - which she did to annoy Apis - she made a good companion. They met Romeo the drone, a love-sick male bee who wanted nothing more than to be near Queen Selma and to tell her jokes, and Razzle-Dazzle Basil with his Power to the Drones campaign to protect male bees who were generally thrown out of the hive in autumn. They battled against a surprise attack of raiding wasps, rallied to Queen Selma when she was overthrown and, thanks to their tiny size, witnessed plenty of the village dramas - the plotting of a robbery, a proposal of marriage by Ned's doctor and the latest misdemeanours of the school bully.
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Thomas Keneally was born in 1935 and was educated in Sydney, Australia. He trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take orders. Although Ned Kelly and the City of Bees is his first book for children, he is one of Australia's foremost novelists and has won many prizes for his adult fiction. Among these books are Bring Larks and Heroes, which won the Miles Franklin award for the best Australian novel of 1967, The Survivor, which was the joint winner of the 1970 Captain Cook Literary Award, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which was on the short list for the Booker Prize in 1972, and Gossip From the Forest, runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1975. Thomas Keneally is married, with two daughters, and lives in Sydney.
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Schindler's List and Bees,
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I was fascinated that the author of Schindler's List wrote a children's story. I am looking forward to reading it very much.
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