We had such a beautiful launch on Saturday November 29 at lovely Gleebooks for The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef, with all the wonderful people who came to celebrate with us: family, friends, fellow authors and illustrators, and readers!
Thank you to Rachel and all the team at Gleebooks for hosting us so warmly, to Marie and her team for the delicious macarons (which disappeared in record time!) to Steve from Hardie Grant for being there to cheer us on, to our gorgeous families and friends who turned out in force to support us, and to all the lovely readers who took our book to their hearts.
What a joyous welcome for The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef!
Today is the publication date of The Fishmonger And The Pastry Chef, my new picture book with the wonderful illustrator Cheryl Orsini. Published by Little Hare (Hardie Grant Books), and partly inspired by my family history in the beautiful French Basque seaside town of Biarritz, it’s a very special book indeed. I can’t begin to say how much I adore the gorgeous visual world that Cheryl created around my text, weaving in her own beautiful, engaging threads of imagination and warmth. It’s been pure joy to work with her as co-creator!
Many thanks to our agent, Margaret Connolly, our publisher, Chren Byng, editor Johanna Gogos, and all the excellent team at Little Hare and Hardie Grant children’s publishing for your belief in this book and for helping to make it the most beautiful production ever.
Thanks also to the reviewers and booksellers who even in advance of publication have taken our book to their hearts–it is hugely appreciated! And here’s hoping The Fishmonger And The Pastry Chef will find its way into many, many hands and hearts, all over the country.
And if you’re in Sydney, do come and celebrate the launch of The Fishmonger And The Pastry Chef with us on Saturday November 29 at 2pm, at Gleebooks (Glebe). There will be sweet treats, stories and crafty things! RSVP to rachel@gleebooks.com.au
Lovely double celebration last night in beautiful bookshop, Reader’s Companion in Armidale, for both In The Paris Fashion and The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef!
When I was in Sydney last week, I caught up with the wonderful Cheryl Orsini, my co-creator on The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef–she created the glorious visual world of the book. Cheryl brought along her original artwork for the book, and explained how she creates scenes in layers–it was absolutely fascinating and so stunning! I took heaps of photos–have a look at these.
An absolutely delicious, gorgeous parcel arrived for me yesterday: advance copies of The Fishmonger and the Pastry chef, my forthcoming picture book with the wonderful Cheryl Orsini, which is coming out with Little Hare (Hardie Grant Kids) in late November. I am so very happy with it, it is so very very beautiful! Elements of the story are freely inspired my family history in the beautiful seaside town of Biarritz, but it’s also very much its own thing, and the glorious visual world Cheryl has created is the most perfect place for my words to live in.
It’s also the most gorgeous production, as a physical object, with a textured cover, beautiful satin internal paper that really showcases the illustrations, and great design. Thank you so much to our lovely publisher Chren Byng, editor Johanna Gogos, and all the Hardie Grant Kids team for helping to make this book the most perfect it could be!
Last week, I did a wonderful tour of Sydney bookshops with Lorena Carrington, fabulous illustrator and co-creator of our picture book The Giant. On foot, by train and by bus, we went to several of Sydney’s best bookshops, including, in the CBD, Abbeys, Kinokuniya, and Dymocks George St, plus Harry Hartog in Bondi Junction, Gleebooks in Glebe and Berkelouw in Leichhardt. Everywhere we received a warm welcome, and the culmination was a wonderful event for the book at the fabulous bookshop Better Read than Dead in Newtown, where the fantastic author Ursula Dubosarsky launched it into the world, our lovely publisher Anna Solding of MidnightSun Publishing attended, coming all the way from Adelaide, and a warm supportive crowd came to share the celebration with us! It was all so much fun and we are so grateful for all the warm support of booksellers, readers, and fellow creators for our gentle Giant!
Today, August 1, is the official publication day for The Giant, my new picture book with the wonderful illustrator, Lorena Carrington, and we are so thrilled! Published by MidnightSun Publishing, The Giant is a fable about, yes, a giant! He wakes from a long sleep and happily walks down the mountain to find his old friends in the town–but alas, so much time has passed since he went to sleep that nobody remembers him and everyone runs away in fear–everyone, that is, except for–well, read the book to find out!
The Giant is my second picture-book collaboration with Lorena, after Satin (MidnightSun Publishing, 2023), which was awarded a Notable Books citation in the 2024 Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Awards. And as with Satin, creating The Giant was an absolute blast of a book to create together with our lovely publisher Anna Solding and her team at MidnightSun Publishing.
To celebrate the book’s publication, Lorena and I have written a bit about how it all came about. Hope you enjoy reading about it–and enjoy reading the book, too!
From Sophie:
The idea for the story of The Giant came into my head one day when I was walking up the road on a sunny but cold winter morning. He just arrived without warning; one minute I was strolling along, just enjoying the walk, the next minute I had stopped abruptly, seeing him so clearly, waking up, yawning and stretching after sleeping in his cave for a very, very long time.
As a child, I had read old stories where great heroes slept for centuries in caves but might wake up one day if they were needed to fight battles. But I knew my giant wasn’t about fighting battles, he was about finding his friends. And I could imagine his excitement as he went out into the sunshine, filled with joy as he thought he could see his friends again. And then his sadness as he realised nobody remembered him…I hurried home then so I could write his story down and find out what happened next to this gentle giant whose tears could make a river rise.
It was wonderful to write it and even more wonderful and thrilling to see the Giant and his world come to life in Lorena’s magical illustrations!
on left, part of the original first draft in my notebook, on right the finished draft on the computer
From Lorena:
I loved Sophie’s gentle giant from the first time I read her story, and I could picture him immediately in my mind. He is made up completely from elements of nature: moss, stick, leaves, little bits and pieces you might find out walking, so I like think of him as being real part of the landscape that he’s in. In fact, most of the illustrations in this book are made with photographs of nature montaged together, along with paper collage, and a little bit of drawing.
I also knew right from the start that I wanted the illustrations to be full of colour. Set over a full day, from sunrise to after dark, the colours change according to the time of day. If you look closely you can see I’ve used photographs of different landscapes to make up landscapes in the giant’s world, and also added some cut paper, little bits of drawings, and added little interesting things here and there. Look out for the drawing of the giant in the book, and see if the scene repeats itself in a different way later in the book. Can you find versions of the birds and the butterfly from the page borders too?
pages showing the changing of the light over the course of the book…contrasts: the Giant ‘in an old book’ and ‘in real life’...
The Giant, by Sophie Masson and Lorena Carrington, published by MidnightSun Publishing, August 1, 2025. ISBN 9781922858658. Available in all good bookshops around Australia! You can read a few fabulous early reviews here, here and here.
I am absolutely thrilled to reveal the gorgeous cover of my upcoming picture book with the fantastic Cheryl Orsini, The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef. This lovely picture book, set in ‘a beautiful seaside town full of beautiful places’, around a young boy called Lucas and two of his favourite people, his aunt Violette, a pastry chef, and his friend Cyprien, a fishmonger, is partly inspired by aspects of my family history in the beautiful seaside town of Biarritz…
It was such a joy to write this story and such a delight to see its visual world come to such charming, lively, delicious and endearing life in Cheryl’s gorgeous illustrations, and I can’t wait to see it come out into the world!
The Fishmonger and the Pastry Chef will be published by Hardie Grant Kids in their Little Hare imprint in November.
I had a number of excellent book events in March: on March 12, a short talk at the State Library of NSW for the Society of Women Writers (NSW branch), where I focussed on my joint French and Australian influences, via my two most recent books, Bold Ben Hall and A Secret Garden in Paris; on March 13, two book events in Goulburn Library–a storytime event in the morning, around Satin and Cockadoodledoo, read to both children and their families and people from a local nursing home, and an event centred around my Sophie Beaumont adult novels, The Paris Cooking School and A Secret Garden in Paris, in the evening. On March 29, I did a book signing for Bold Ben Hall at Collins Booksellers in Armidale, and on March 30 I was at the fabulous Seasons of New England Expo, spruiking my books and chatting with readers and fellow attendees! Here are a few pics from the various events.
There’s going to be a lot of events coming up in March for me!
March 1: Paperback edition of Satin is released by MidnightSun Publishing.
March 5: Publication day of Bold Ben Hall (Walker Books)
March 8: Signing morning for Bold Ben Hall at Collins Booksellers, Armidale.
March 12: Talk at the State Library of NSW for The Society of Women Writers NSW–my talk, which is part of festivities around the 100th anniversary of the Society, will be around my French and Australian inspirations.
March 13: Two events at Goulburn Library: a morning Storytime event for kids, focussed around Satin and Cockadoodledoo; and an evening talk and Q and A for adults, centred on A Secret Garden in Paris.
Feathers of the Firebird 