Jerningham by Cristina Sanders

$37.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

Aue by Becky Manawatu

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

Winner! of the Ockham NZ Book Awards - Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father's. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father an d sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to another violent home. But Arama is braver than he looks, and he has a friend and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sorrow. As long as there's aroha to give and stories to tell and a good supply of plasters. Here is a novel that is both raw and sublime, a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction. Haere mai, Becky Manawatu. ...Show more

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Taryn Cornick believes that the past is behind her – her sister’s death by violence, and her own ill-conceived revenge. She has chosen to live a life more professional than personal. She has written a book about the things that threaten libraries – insects, damp, light, fire, carelessn ess and uncaring. The book is a success, but not all of the attention it brings her is good. There are questions about a fire in the library at Princes Gate, her grandparents’ house, and about an ancient scroll box known as the Firestarter. A policeman, Jacob Berger, has questions about a cold case. There are threatening phone calls. And a shadowy young man named Shift appears, bringing his shadows with him. Taryn, Jacob, Shift – three people are driven towards a reckoning felt in more than one world. The Absolute Book is an epic fantasy, intimate in tone. A book where hidden treasures are recovered; where wicked things people think they’ve shaken from their trails find their scent again. A book about beautiful societies founded on theft and treachery, and one in which dead sisters are a living force. It is a book of journeys and returns, set in London, Norfolk, and the Wye Valley; in Auckland, New Zealand; in the Island of Apples and Summer Road of the Sidhe; at Hell’s Gate; in the Tacit with its tombs; and in the hospitals and train stations of Purgatory. Cover: Catherine Nelson, Lost (2014). 'An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book.' —Francis Spufford ‘The master is present. To read Knox on such a huge canvas – to be immersed in her worlds, wrapped in her intelligence and craft so completely – is an experience not be missed. Lessing, Le Guin, Knox – books where the best hearts meet the best minds meet the best imaginations are few and far between. The Absolute Book is a triumph of fantasy grounded in the reality and challenges of the moment we live in.’ —Pip Adam ...Show more

Winged Helmet White Horse by Karyn Hay

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Following the success of Karyn Hay’s historical fiction novel, The March of the Foxgloves, Karyn returns with Winged Helmet, White Horse – more reminiscent in style of her debut, Emerald Budgies. Set in contemporary London, Winged Helmet, White Horse is a darkly comic psychological drama. Ti m has mastered the art of subordination; to his job, his wife, and even his daughter. Having written one critically acclaimed book of poetry he is struggling to write a second, while his wife, Natasha, who is into “positive affirmations”, and spending money, has plans of her own. As Tim stumbles through the social landscape of suburban London, trying to give up alcohol and gain some control over his life, he makes several disturbing discoveries; ultimately concluding that he is not in control of anything, and that it’s all been a terrible, deadly illusion. ...Show more

Through the Lonesome Dark by Paddy Richardson

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Blackball, West Coast, pre-World War I. Three youngsters; Pansy, Clem and Otto. Life had an idyllic surface with a far from idyllic underside for youngsters in this mining town. As a World War approaches, the harsh realities become apparent — just because you are smart and motivated there is no certaint y that you can advance yourself in this world, especially if you are a girl. With a light hand on a dark time in history, Paddy Richardson navigates the territory between “Denniston Rose” and “Birdsong” with great skill. Characters you want to cry for battle on against themselves, family, society and world events. ...Show more

The Heading Dog Who Split in Half: Legends and Tall Tales from New Zealand

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

The Heading Dog Who Spilt in Half is a charming blend of tall tales, shanties and legends from New Zealand, all bound up in a visually pleasing collection. The tales themselves are simple and narrated in a light, yarn-like style, complemented well by the stark black and white line art of the images. Som e of the illustrations are a little ghoulish - there¿s a bag of scattered limbs on one page, the cross-section of the heading dog (that was split in half) on another. All are wonderfully rendered. ...Show more

The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey

$30.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: Very Good

Winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Siggi lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words ('promise', 'love', 'mercy'). Erich is an only child living a lush rural life, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions. Drawn together as Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theatre amidst the rubble of Berlin. The days they spend there together will shape the rest of their lives. Watching over Siggi and Erich is the wish child. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the wreckage of a nation's dream. ...Show more

One Minute Crying Time by Barbara Ewing

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

This vivid memoir by well-known New Zealand actor and novelist Barbara Ewing covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s - a very different time - and ends in 1962, when she boards a ship for London, to study at the Royal Acade my of Dramatic Art. It draws heavily on the diaries she kept from the age of twelve, which lead her to some surprising conclusions about memory and truth. Ewing struggled with what would now be diagnosed as anxiety; she had a difficult relationship with her brilliant but frustrated and angry mother; and her decision to somehow learn te reo Maori drew her into a world to which few Pakeha had access. A love affair with a young Maori man destined for greatness was complicated by society's unease about such relationships, and changed them both. Evocative, candid, brave, bright and darting, this entrancing book takes us to a long-ago New Zealand and to enduring truths about love. ...Show more

The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

From the author of the acclaimed The Wish Child comes something unexpected and fearless: a found novel. The Beat of the Pendulum is the result of one year in which Chidgey drew upon the language she encountered on a daily basis, such as news stories, radio broadcasts, emails, social media, street signs, TV, and many conversations. As Chidgey filters and shapes the linguistic chaos of her recordings, a set of characters emerge - her family, including her young daughter, and her husband, mother and sister, her friends, and an extended family formed through surrogacy and donation. In her chronicling of moments of loveliness, strangeness, comedy and poetry and sorrow, Chidgey plays with the nature of time and its passing. The Beat of the Pendulum is also an exploration of human memory - how we acquire it, and how we lose it. This bravely experimental and immersive work draws us into the detail, reverberation and transience of a year in a life. ...Show more

Selected Stories - Vincent O'Sullivan by VINCENT O'SULLIVAN

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

Presenting thirty-five stories from seven collections published over more than forty years, Vincent O'Sullivan's Selected Stories is a milestone in the career of one of New Zealand's leading writers.

The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction

And how could she go on living between two worlds, one she knew and understood but could no longer be in, and another that she was in but was not permitted to know?   Pregnant after rape, seventeen-year-old Josephina Hansen is exiled from her family home in Kiel in the north of Germany. She find s refuge with her sister’s Danish family in Sønderborg, then in Hamburg with a philanthropic businessman and, later, a radical journalist and his sister. In 1880 the worsening political situation forces this makeshift family into exile – and a new life in a small farming settlement in the Kaitīeke valley in New Zealand.   Accompanying Josephina on the journey is an ancient sewing sampler given to her by her grandmother. In its lovingly stitched pictures she finds a way of mapping the world she has come from – and that is traversed by the birds of her childhood, the Rohrsänger or reed warblers, which migrate yearly from the salt marshes near her home to ‘somewhere nice and warm where the oranges grow’.   Josephina’s story is framed by the reunion of Frank and Beth, descendants of two of her three children by different fathers. It is Beth’s discovery of the reason for the disappearance from the family story of Josephina’s third child that unlocks memory and meaning from the intricately stitched story of the migrating reed warblers. The Reed Warbler is a beautiful and rich family saga that weaves together the lives of six generations, overseen, as Josephina’s son Wolf would observe at a family reunion in 1915, by ‘Ma with that glint in her eye’.   ‘Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories.’ — Catherine Chidgey ...Show more

Brushstrokes of Memory by Karen McMillan

$35.00 NZD

Category: NZ Fiction | Reading Level: very good

A novel of love, lost memories and rediscovering dreams.On her thirty-second birthday, Rebecca is in high spirits. She adores her husband of seven years, Daniel, a successful musician. She is carving out a reputation as a talented painter. Life could not be better. But in 2013, she wakes in hospital aft er a head injury and finds out that nearly a decade of her life has been erased from her memory. Now almost forty-two, she can't remember anything after her thirty-second birthday, a decade fraught with changes she would never have anticipated - illness, infidelity, betrayal, separation and death - and the disintegration of many of her dreams.Feeling like she is still thirty-two, Rebecca has to grapple with suddenly being so much older and with a world that is more complicated than she remembers. As she learns about her life from the last decade, she comes to realise she has lost her way. But if she can't remember anything of nearly ten years, then could this be the chance for her to wipe the slate clean and start again? ...Show more