The steady flow of letters from children to Colin Thiele, one of Australia?s best known and loved authors, began after the publication of The Sun on the Stubble in 1961. From the time that Storm Boy was published in 1963, letters flooded the Thiele letterbox until it overflowed and he was obliged to build a bigger one. Wading through the weekly deluge became part of his life. Colin never closed the floodgate or handed over control to a secretary when he was swamped. The rush of letters meant negotiating the torrent coming from places across a whole nation and attending to the tributary trickle from foreign places. He took the task seriously, regarding it as part of a responsible author?s duty of care to channel answers to numerous questions. Some correspondents became his friends and some followed in his footsteps as writers and editors.

This book is about them but most of all it is about a storyteller who devoted his life to an outpouring of books that irrigated the minds of young people; and it is about a man whose genuine interest in his readers streamed out to them in personal replies to a great abundance of letters.