New Zealand

In this addictive, smart, wry yet sad, many-layered, utterly credible novel, Bernard Beckett calls on all his skills as a dramatist and man of ideas. Acid Song is a novel that explores the relationship between ethics and science, yet it's one that makes no sacrifice of action, dramatic pace, nor character. It's election day in contemporary New Zealand. From a staffroom argument about a playground...

Bulibasha is leader of the great Mahana family of shearers and sportspeople. Rupeni Poata is his arch enemy. The two families clash constantly: in sport, cultural contests and, finally, in the Golden Fleece competition to find the greatest shearing gang in New Zealand. Caught amid the conflict the teenager Simeon, grandson of Bulibasha and Ramona, struggles with his own feelings and loyalties as...

Sam Hunt is New Zealand's best-known poet. For almost 40 years he has been writing, reading and performing poetry, touring New Zealand constantly and reading his poems in pubs, theatres, schools and many other venues. No other poet in New Zealand has managed to make a living by performing their poems, and it says much about the affection with which Sam is regarded in New Zealand that he has...

One day in 1955 the ‘father of New Zealand fiction’ finds a young woman on his doorstep. A writer herself, she has recently emerged from a lengthy spell in hospital and is looking for somewhere safe to live and write. Somewhat to his own surprise, not to mention discomfort, he takes her in. What happens behind that high Takapuna hedge in the ensuing year is the story told in this delightful and...

Differing interpretations can define and bind us, as New Zealanders have discovered with the Treaty of Waitangi. The starting-off point for this collection of short stories is a piece of text or image that is read differently by different people: be it because of ambiguity, or misapprehension, a problem of translation, or opposing perspectives or cultures. This book is not meant to explore the...

Here for the first time in one volume, are Maurice Shadbolt's three best-selling and award-winning novels The House of Strife, Monday's Warriors and Season of the Jew. Together they comprise his New Zealand Wars Trilogy, generally seen as New Zealand's finest historical fiction. Drawing on real events in the New Zealand Wars from the 1840s to the 1860s, these novels are rich in humanity with a...

Alan Duff's groundbreaking first novel is one of the most talked about books ever published in New Zealand and now the basis of a major New Zealand film. This hard hitting story is a frank and uncompromising portrayal of Maoaris in New Zealand society. It is a raw and powerful story in which everyone ia a victim until the strength and vision of one woman transcends brutality and leads the way to...

In a small coastal community threatened by developers who would ravage their lands it is a time of fear and confusion - and growing anger. The prophet child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama shares his people's struggles against bulldozers and fast money talk. When dramatic events menace the marae, his grief and rage threaten to burst beyond the confines of his twisted body. His all-seeing eye looks forward...

Pounamu Pounamu is classic Ihimaera. First published om 1972, it was immediately endorsed by Maori and Pakeha alike for its original stories that showed how important Maori identity is for all New Zealanders. As Katherine Mansfield did in her first collection In a German Pension (1911), and Janet Frame in The Lagoon (1951), Witi Ihimaera explores in Pounamu Pounamu what it is like to be a New...

Harry Baird lives with his mother, father and younger brother Cal in Calliope Bay, at the edge of the world. Summer has come, and those who can have left the bay for the allure of the far away city. Among them is Harry's mother, who has left behind a case of homemade ginger beer and a vague promise of return. Harry and Cal are too busy enjoying their holidays, playing in the caves and the old...

There has never been a New Zealand novel quite like The Parihaka Woman. Richly imaginative and original, weaving together fact and fiction, it sets the remarkable story of Erenora against the historical background of the turbulent and compelling events that occurred in Parihaka during the 1870s and 1880s. Parihaka is the place Erenora calls home, a peaceful Taranaki settlement overcome by war and...

A Rejacketed Reissue Alice Roland, together with her children, boxes, mattresses and piano, is punted up river to the 'appalling isolation' of their new home, 'a small house against a splendid wall of bush' in the kauri forest at Pukekaroro. She is joining her husband there, a reunion that is far from warm, but this remote place is to mark Alice's long and steady growth towards shared love, a new...

Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he's focused on his duties as chief of Ngati Konohi in Whangara, on the East Coast - a tribe that claims descent from the legendary 'whale rider.' In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir - there's only Kahu. She should be next in line for the title,...

In this new novel acclaimed Maori novelist Patricia Grace visits the often terrifying and complex world faced by men of the Maori Battalion in Italy during the Second World War. Tu is proud of his name - the Maori god of war. But for the returned soldier there's a shadow over his own war experience with the Maori Battalion in Italy. Three young men from the one family went to war, but only one...

The grass'd been cleared away yesterday by her mother when they visited on the sixth anniversary of her death, Beth and what remained of her family; so the nameplate was clear even if the painted indentation of name, date of birth and date of death was almost bled of its white by the sun, the elements that Polly could never stop wondering if her sister could still feel, specially the rain getting...