Book Launch - Eggshell

Join us at Imprints Booksellers for the Launch of Olivia De Zilva's second novel, 'Eggshell'!

Light refreshments will be provided.

ABOUT EGGSHELL

Set in 2000s Adelaide, Eggshell tells the story of Kira, a sarcastic, cynical teenager living in a council flat with her Cantonese grandmother (Apoh) and her rebellious older cousin, Jake. This novella starts and ends with Kira's experience of Year 12 where she is caught between two worlds: being a subservient Cantonese granddaughter and a Big Brother-watching, boy-crazy Australian schoolgirl. Eggshell is a young-adult novella dealing with themes of identity, racism, romance, sexuality and adolescence.

PRAISE FOR EGGSHELL

‘Eggshell really gets into the skin of a teenager grappling with adult responsibilities and caring duties. Kira’s world is completely real, her voice imbued with the urgency of a young adult trying to make sense of both her rich interior world and the often hostile exterior one. Olivia De Zilva’s voice explodes with a radiant energy, a raw and potent emotional power’ –
Alice Pung, author of Unpolished Gem, Laurinda and One Hundred Days

'As a Chinese Australian who lived through the early 2000s, this stunning novella gave me cultural whiplash, taking me straight back to my salad days of early internet, teen fashion mags, Charlie perfume in the girl's locker rooms and rites of passages with privileged Western students! I laughed out loud at the biting humour, I wept for these flesh and bone characters and I nodded along to our shared Asian experience until my neck hurt. Olivia is an exciting new powerhouse and I will be following her career keenly.' –

Shirley Marr author of A Glasshouse of Stars and All Four Quarters of the Moon

'Delightfully raucous and rich in detail, Eggshell is packed with all the cringe, colour, heartache and hilarity of high school. De Zilva has created a cast of memorable characters that you'll fall in love with, groan at, despair for and ultimately cheer on with both fists raised.' –

Erin Gough author of Amelia Westlake Was Never Here and The Flywheel

‘De Zilva has established a unique and much-needed voice in Australian literature. Her writing is exquisitely observant, brutally truthful and genuinely hilarious. She effortlessly balances mordant humour with painful truthbombs about Australia’s multicultural illusion of the Noughties. Her unflinching depiction of the cumulative losses and grief of cancer broke my heart‘ –
Leanne Hall, author of The Gaps and Iris and the Tiger

‘Delightfully raucous and rich in detail, Eggshell is packed with all the cringe, colour, heartache and hilarity of high school. De Zilva has created a cast of memorable characters that you’ll fall in love with, groan at, despair for and ultimately cheer on with both fists raised‘ –
Erin Gough, author of Amelia Westlake Was Never Here and The Flywheel

About Olivia

Olivia De Zilva is a writer based in Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). Her novel Plastic Budgie was released in July 2025 by Pink Shorts Press. Her novella Eggshell will be released by Spineless Wonders in November 2025. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Guardian, SBS, The Saturday Paper, Mascara Literary Review and many other publications. Olivia's writing has been shortlisted by the Richell Prize, The Kat Muscat Fellowship, The Deborah Cass award and recently, was the inaugural winner of the AAWP Novella Prize. 

About Adam

Adam Cece is an award-winning author of children’s books, including Wesley Booth Super Sleuth, Twin Spin, and the hilarious Huggabie Falls series, which has been published worldwide. He is co-coordinator of the South Australian branch of the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators, a South Australian Premier’s Reading Challenge Ambassador, a mentor, workshop facilitator and manuscript assessor, and visits schools and libraries delivering fun, interactive talks focused on being an author, the craft of writing, getting published, solving mysteries, and how to write a cracking shopping list. The unputdownable, puzzled-filled thriller, The Locked Room, is his first book for young adults.