Promotional Information

Jesse O's award-winning novel about a deadly pandemic and a family in lockdown, rereleased with all new illustrations by Toby Morris.

About the Author

Jesse O (Author)
Jesse O is the pseudonym for award-winning poet and author Jessica Le Bas. Her first poetry collection, Incognito (AUP 2007), won the Best First Book of Poetry Award at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. A second collection, Walking to Africa (AUP 2009), which explored adolescent mental illness, was a finalist in the 2010 Ashton Wylie Book Awards. Her first novel for children, Staying Home (Puffin 2010) won a Storylines Notable Junior Fiction Award in 2011. In 2019, she won the prestigious Sarah Broome Poetry Prize for a sequence of poems described by the judge, Toronto Poet Laureate Anne Michaels, as 'alive with detail acutely observed'. Jessica Le Bas divides her time between Nelson, New Zealand and Rarotonga.
Toby Morris (Illustrator)
Toby Morris is an award-winning illustrator, comic artist and author of the successful non-fiction comic series The Side Eye on the Spinoff and The Pencilsword on RNZ. He has written several children's books including Capsicum, Capsi Go, The Day The Costumes Stuck, Don't Puke On Your Dad and the graphic novel Te Tiriti O Waitangi and developed artwork for musicians including The Beths, Beastwars, Neil and Liam Finn, Ladyhawke and Phoenix Foundation, and diverse brands including the Edmonds Baking Powder box! In 2020, his animated illustration collaborations with scientist Siouxsie Wiles explaining the Covid-19 pandemic were viewed and shared all over the world, leading to an ongoing gig with the WHO. He lives in Auckland.