
Today I ask Gillian Polack five questions about her new book!
1. What’s the name of your latest book – and how hard was it to pick a title?
The Green Children Help Out. It was sadly simple to find this title. I actually asked the publisher if it needed changing, because it was my working title (as a joke, to myself) and I never expected that it would be the final title. I often change the titles of novels as I work on them, to reflect what I’m thinking at the time. Its first draft title was Tsarfat.
2. If you could choose anyone from any time period, who would you cast as the leads in your latest book?
Data: Millie Bobby Brown or Margot Robbie
David: Lawrence Ong
Ari: Eva Green
Big Ben: Hermione Gingold
3. What five words best describe your story?
Superheroes, magic, daft, folkstuff, love
4. Who is your favourite fictional team/couple?
Harriet Vane and Lord Peter WImsey (from the books by Jill Paton Walsh), purely because of the Latin.
5. What song reflects a theme, character, relationship or scene in your book?
Disturbed’s cover of The Sound of Silence.
About The Green Children Help Out
In an old tunnel under France, a door leads to a tiny pocket universe called Tsarfat. If you survive the passage through that door, you will become an Envoy to an Earth that’s just a bit different from ours. Earth2 not only has many kinds of magic, it has government offices to regulate that magic.
Once you’re through the door, people will call you a Green Child, or a superhero. So many of your dreams will come true.
Something is very wrong on Earth2. The Green Children are dying. Pits full of fire and brimstone are opening in churches. Doors into a Nazi-ruled universe are appearing.
The Green Children and their friends at the Offices of the Non-Natural Environment have two new tasks: to save themselves … and the world.
Buy The Green Children Help Out
About Gillian Polack

Dr Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. The Green Children Help Out is her newest novel. The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.
Social Media
- Website: https://gillianpolack.com/
- Facebook https://www.facebook.com/gillian.polack/
- Twitter https://twitter.com/GillianPolack
- Patreon https://www.patreon.com/GillianPolack