The National Simultaneous Storytime (NSS) is held annually by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). Each year a picture book is chosen, written and illustrated by Australian artists. The book is read simultaneously in libraries, schools, bookshops and homes across the country, as well as online.
For those readers who missed this year’s NSS on Wednesday 21 May, the book chosen is The Truck Cat, winner of the 2025 Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) for Children’s Picture Book. Published in October 2024, it is written by Deborah Frenkel and illustrated by Danny Snell.
The book tells the story of a cat called Tinka, who lives in a B-double tri-axle truck with his human Yacoub. Together they travel all around the country, carrying different cargo and “learning the strange new landscape on the way”.
“Sometimes apples, sometimes pears. Sometimes lots and lots of eggs. Yacoub had to drive carefully, because otherwise those eggs would all get scrambled.”
Truck driving is a lonely profession, but Yacoub is particularly yearning for connection because his home country is far away and people around him cannot always understand “his jokes, his words, his silences”. Tinka, too, misses his old home, a warm basket “full of mewling siblings and a mama cat”.
“So Tinka and Yacoub remembered their memories together. Then at night, when the truck stopped to rest under the Milky Way, Tinka sat on Yacoub’s lap and purred into the sky.” When the pair become unexpectedly separated, “Tinka worried about Yacoub, along in the truck with just eggs to talk to”, while “Tacoub worried too, from town to town to town, and back again”.
Their story has a wonderful ending, but it is surprising how the gentle words and the pastel-toned illustrations can be so satisfying and heart-warming.
Anyone who has ever felt lonely in a crowd can emphasise with Yacoub’s journey.
One can also appreciate the emotional bond and mutual trust between humans and animals. But this story is unique, precisely because it is simple and sweet. In its short passages a subtle yet universal message is conveyed, which is all about friendship and belonging.
In a note at the book’s end, the author mentions how her grandparents arrived in Australia in 1947 to begin a new life. “At some point, there came a moment when this country of refuge became something more familiar: it became their home. This moment intrigued me.”
Which explains why this story resonates with so many people, because ours is a migrant nation. Like Yacoub and the author’s grandparents, and like so many others moving across this continent for reasons that are important to them, people “must create for themselves a new life in a land far, far away”.
“Their origins are different, but they’re all searching for the same thing: a new place to call home”. They must “make a new home, even while brimful of memories of the old one”.
Highly recommended for young readers and those young at heart.
