A New Kind of Beautiful

A powerful story about love, change and what beauty means from award-winning author Suzy Zail

By: Suzy Zail

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Paperback | 27 July 2026

At a Glance

Format
Paperback

Age
13 - 17

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 13.2 x 2.9

Paperback

RRP $22.99

$20.75

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A moving novel about love, loss, and the beauty in the things we can't always see.

Paige Wilding has her future mapped out — the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she's diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur.

She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year.

But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.

A powerful story about choosing real over perfect.

About the Author

An award winning, internationally published author of more than a dozen books, Suzy Zail is best-known for her young adult novels The Wrong Boy, Alexander Altmann and I am Change, books that shine a light on injustice. Her books are studied in schools and have been included in the USBBY’s Outstanding International Books list.

Her most recent novel, Inkflower, draws on her childhood and tells the story of a man who, in his last months with Motor Neurone Disease, reveals to his daughter a Holocaust story he has kept hidden. Inkflower has been shortlisted for the CBCA awards, the Booklinks Historical novel award, the YABBAs and the ASLA Danz awards, and won kids’ choice for Book of the Year, Older Readers, at the 2024 CBCA awards.

Industry Reviews

Zail’s novels, including I Am Change, Alexander Altmann and Inkflower, are known to shine a light on social justice while capturing the vicissitudes of adolescence. The complexities of Paige’s myriad and often conflicting emotions are explored with depth and nuance, as are those of her parents, who hold themselves responsible for her disease. Most notably, A New Kind of Beautiful offers an impressively in-depth exploration of the psyche of a young woman navigating some typical challenges of one’s teenage years, compounded by the added pressure of coming to terms with a fundamentally life-altering medical condition. The novel will appeal to readers of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything.

Books + Publishing

This is a beautiful coming-of-age story about love, loss, identity, friendship, and learning that sometimes the life you planned isn’t the life you’re meant to live. It made me feel everything—anger, grief, frustration, hope, joy, and the quiet strength that comes with rebuilding yourself after everything changes. I cried more than once, smiled just as much, and closed the book feeling incredibly grateful I’d picked it up.

booked.withb via instagram

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