If you've spent any time in the world of Australian education, chances are you've come across Dr Michael Nagel. And if you have, you'll understand why we're so excited about what's coming later this year.
Michael is one of those rare people who can take genuinely complex science — the kind that fills academic journals and takes years to untangle — and make it feel immediately useful to a parent sitting at the kitchen table at seven in the morning, or a teacher standing in front of thirty kids wondering how to reach the one in the back row. He's been doing this for years, and he keeps getting better at it.
Later this year we are publishing two brand new books from Michael: The Livewired Child and The Livewired Teen. Together they form the Livewired Series, and together they cover the full arc of brain development, from the earliest days of life right through adolescence and into early adulthood.
We want to be clear: these are not updated editions of earlier work. They are entirely new books, built from the ground up to reflect where the science is now. And the science has moved. What we understand today about how experience shapes the brain, how the environments we create for children and teenagers quite literally wire and rewire their neural architecture, is more detailed and more actionable than ever. Michael has been across all of it, and these books show that.
The early years are where it all begins. In The Livewired Child, Michael takes us through the developing brain from conception to the early school years – what's happening, why it matters and what parents and educators can actually do with that knowledge. It covers learning, language, emotional intelligence, cognitive development – the full picture, in language that feels like a conversation rather than a lecture.
Every child is born with the most extraordinary organ on earth, a brain that is constantly growing, adapting and rewiring itself in response to the world around it.
If the early years are about building, adolescence is about rebuilding. The teenage brain is not a finished brain that just needs steering, it is undergoing one of the most dramatic transformations of a lifetime. The Livewired Teen is for everyone who has ever looked at a teenager and thought: what on earth is going on in there? Michael traces the adolescent brain from puberty through to early adulthood, and brings the same warmth and clarity he always does to a stage of development that can feel baffling from the outside.
For parents who feel like they've lost their teenager somewhere around Year 8, and for teachers navigating classrooms full of evolving minds, this book is a genuine gift.
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Michael has five books with us already:
It's a body of work we're enormously proud to be part of, and the Livewired Series feels like the most complete expression yet of everything he has spent his career building towards.
The Livewired Child and The Livewired Teen are available to pre-order now. If you know a parent deep in the early years, a teacher wondering how to reach their students, or someone trying to make sense of their teenager — these are the books to put in their hands.
