Fiction - New Zealand

Utterly captivating, quirky and peppered with deliciously black humour... a tantalising recipe for the discerning literary palate. Hello, he?d say, and tilt his little head. Hello. Who?s a clever boy? And some unsuspecting fool would forget what a brute he was and hold up a finger to stroke his vivid glowing feathers. One finger was all he needed to get a talon hold. A flurry of feathers, a triumphant squawk and that was it. Clever Pete, clever Pete, he?d cry while tears ran down the unsuspecting fool?s face and their mouth op... read more

It was the last great science hero fight, but the energy blast ripped a hole in reality, and birthed the Empire State - a young, twisted parallel prohibition-era New York.
When the rift starts to close, both worlds are threatened, and both must fight for the right to exist.

What would make a soldier betray his country? In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy's life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion ski... read more

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 abandoned slaughterhouse, to be too concerned with her absence. When their older cousin-the beautiful, sophisticated Caroline-comes from the ... read more

Opening with a sequence of poems entitled 'King's Lynn and the Pacific' which follows the fortunes of two young sailors voyaging with Captain Cook, and closing with another sequence, 'At Wagner's Tomb', with a central group of poems - alternately witty, satirical, philosophical, reflective, lyrical - in which the 'Dog' theme of the opening sequence returns, this collection shows C. K. Stead to be in full charge of a talent which has surprised, delighted and challenged readers of poetry since it first declared itself in the 1950s.

A wonderful collection of stories and memoir from childhood. Childhood is at times joyful, at times traumatic. In this anthology twenty-six distinguished New Zealand writers evoke memories of their early years, in fiction and memoir. Their stories and memoirs resonate with love and betrayal, friendship and disloyalty, elation and anxiety. The writing features parents and teachers, peers, siblings and other relatives, the loveable and the unloveable. There are wondrous discoveries of the natural and cultural world and glimpses into ... read more

The year is 1878. Luigi Galoni, a young Italian fisherman, is forced to flee his home in Pesaro and sail to New Zealand. He joins a boyhood friend, Leopoldo, in the Haast region, and together they try to break in their land. But Luigi must move on again, first to Westport, then to the isolated coast of Wellington, where he joins an Italian fishing community. There he and his young wife Alice raise a family, defying hardship, misfortune and poverty.A saga of courage, fortitude and abiding love, Alice & Luigi is also a story of the c... read more

Buckinbah Weir is a contemporary mystery set in the forestry backblocks of New Zealand's central North Island. A weir on a forest creek has been the scene of a series of strange murders stretching back to the early 1900s that have never been solved. With the murders occurring intermittently over a long period of time, local people in the small settlements nearby have their own suspicions and theories as to who- or what - may lie behind the heinous crimes, but no one really knows why they keep happening, or when the killer will stri... read more

‘This is a book of memories. Some of them are my own. Some of them belong to others. They are as true and as fallible as any memories — distorted by time and distance and a writer’s choice of words…’ Ben Brown writes of that quintessentially New Zealand way of living that may not change the world or even ripple its waters, but is replete with meaning. Gathered from the tobacco-green valleys of the Motueka River where he grew up during the 60s and 70s, Brown’s memoir is rich with a sense of place... read more

Accessible, haunting and wise poems about children, mokopuna, friends, her late husband (James K. Baxter), and Maori identity. Artwork by John Baxter. First published 1996; this edition with revised order 2003.

A kind of photographs made with words is how New Zealand poet Riemke Ensing describes what a poem is. Like many of our finest poets, she draws inspiration from photographs andphotography. Paul Thompson has investigated the interplay between photography and poetry to see if there were deeper correspondences. There are. Shards of Silver, a visually striking anthology of photographically informed poems, is introduced with essays by photographer Paul Thompson and poet Anna Jackson and is interspersed with intruiging photograph... read more

Presents diverse new poems alongside earlier unpublished work. It is a wild, unpredicatable expression of exuberance for words, love, and social justice. The poems are about the act of writing; about Hone's beloved Shirley Grace; about his hunger for the bounty of Tangaroa, music and sex. They reflect with humour and raw candour the challenges of ageing while having an unquenchable lust for life. Hone Tuwhare has won two Montana NZ Book Awards, has been Te Mata Poet Laureate, and held two honorary doctorates in literature. At 82, h... read more

In her first collection since 2000, award-winning writer J. C. Sturm (Jacquie Baxter) presents short stories that are full of honesty, intimacy and subtle humour. A coda of poems aptly complements each story. This is a marvellous new offering from one of our most talented writers. First published July 2006.

Have times changed?

A new edition of the short stories from the father of modern New Zealand writing and the man who introduced the speech of ordinary New Zealanders to our literature and took it to the international stage.

Classic Ihimaera. First published by Reed in 1972, it collects stories about Maori within settings that are Maori and with characters who are central to that setting — heroes, heroines and villains — rather than supporting players or sidekicks. These stories introduce the themes of aroha, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga — love, acknowledging kin and tribal relationships, and supporting Maori identity — that run through much of Ihimaera’s later work. This new edition of Pounamu Pounamu includes two stories that have been rewr... read more

Rose Anthony is reeling from a series of major and minor crises — including breast cancer and a rift with her lover Olga — when life becomes still more complicated. Someone has literally left a baby on her doorstep, and skeletons are rattling in their closets. This fifth novel from a much-loved writer is a delight: a tightly plotted and entertaining story whose heroine provides a comic, human foil to the seemingly inhuman.

Shortlisted for the 2004 NZ Montana Book Awards, Fiction section In this, James George's extraordinary second novel, three people, strangers all, are thrown together in a world of sand and ocean and sky on Northland's Ninety Mile Beach. Jordan - a tattooed man who lives alone at the base of his ancestral hill in a boat that was never launched - has his solitude broken by the arrival of two travellers: one who falls from the air, another who arrives following childhood tracks. Kingi, a distinguished Battle of Britain veteran, is ... read more

This fine new collection of poetry, Owen Marshall's second, is rich in the themes and preoccupations that have made his short stories and novels so admired. Here are wise, elegiac poems on love and loss, longing and regret, and ageing; beautifully observed, affectionate poems about New Zealand countryside, where 'clear cold barking comes from miles away'; sly and sharply witty poems about human frailty -'Death's an old joke, the Russian said / but comes to each of us as a surprise'; poems that look back to a distant past whose inha... read more

The stories and poems in this collection listen to Billy T.K. and Berlioz; buy sex; search for the greatest guitarist in the world; seek an unusual cure for an embarrassing sexual complaint; look for Audrey Hepburn; remember First World War Arm