New Zealand Favourites

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family.One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor — a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession.As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.The powerful, visionary novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.Endorsements“This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.” — Alice WalkerWinner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature. The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner.

It is 1903 when Thomas Edgar says goodbye to his young wife Sophie and embarks on a journey to the Amazon, where he dreams of finding a mythical butterfly that will make both his name and his fortune. His dreams change, however, soon after his arrival in Brazil... Months later, Thomas arrives home, thin, sick and, worst of all, unable — or unwilling — to speak. Frustrated by his silence, Sophie takes increasingly drastic measures to uncover the truth about what happened to her husband while he was away. But as she sorts through Thomas's diaries and boxes of exquisite butterflies, it becomes clear that the truth may not be easy to bear.Endorsements"The Sound of Butterflies fuses Edwardian gentility with obsession, murder and a glimpse of the giddy excess of the Brazilian rubber boom... Told in prose as opulent as one of Thomas's specimens, it's a convincing debut." — Observer

In the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time.On the first, she ventured further south than any human had ever been. On the second, she vanished with her 129-strong crew in the wastes of the Canadian Arctic.Her fate remained a mystery for over 160 years.Then, in 2014, she was found.This is her story.

A boy stands on the roadside on his way to London, alone in the rain.No memories, beyond what he can hold in his hands at any given moment.No directions, as written words have long since been forbidden.No parents — just a melody that tugs at him, a thread to follow. A song that says if he can just get to the capital, he may find some answers about what happened to them.The world around Simon sings, each movement a pulse of rhythm, each object weaving its own melody, music ringing in every drop of air.Welcome to the world of The Chimes. Here, life is orchestrated by a vast musical instrument that renders people unable to form new memories. The past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphony.But slowly, inexplicably, Simon is beginning to remember. He emerges from sleep each morning with a pricking feeling, and senses there is something he urgently has to do. In the city Simon meets Lucien, who has a gift for hearing, some secrets of his own, and a theory about the danger lurking in Simon's past.Endorsements'The Chimes is a remarkable debut. It's inventive, beautifully written, and completely absorbing. I highly recommend it.' — Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

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, carelessness 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.

James Pōneke is a young Māori orphan, raised by missionaries, with a burning desire to travel and explore the world. When an English artist on a tour of New Zealand invites James to return home with him, the boy eagerly accepts and agrees to become a living exhibit at the artist’s London show.Gainsborough loathes pandering to grand sitters, but he changes his tune when he is commissioned to paint King George III and his large family. In their final, most bitter competition, who will be chosen as court painter, Tom or Sir Joshua?By day, James dresses in full tribal outfit, being stared at, prodded and examined by paying visitors. By night, he is free to explore the city, but anything can happen to a young New Zealander on the savage streets of Victorian London and James is unprepared for the wonders, dangers and unearthed secrets that await.The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke is an unforgettable work of historical fiction in the spirit of Sarah Waters and Sarah Perry.Endorsements'A historical love letter to London, a coming-of-age story, a love story' — Stella Duffy'A riveting vision of the world seen from the inside out. The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke is a gutsy, searing and totally absorbing read. I loved it all the way' — Fiona Kidman'Made streets I’ve walked a thousand times seem new and strange' — Damian Barr

An enthralling memoir, packed with stories of the formative years of this much-loved writer.Witi Ihimaera is a consummate storyteller — one critic calling him one of New Zealand's ‘finest and most memorable’. Some of his best stories, however, are about his own life. This honest, stirring work tells of the family and community into which Ihimaera was born, of his early life in rural New Zealand, of family secrets, of facing anguish and challenges, and of laughter and love. As Ihimaera tells of the myths that formed his early imagination, he also reveals the experiences from real life that wriggled into his fiction.Alive with an inventive, stimulating narrative and vividly portrayed relatives, this memoir is engrossing, entertaining and moving, but, more than this, it is also a vital record of what it means to grow up Maori.

Richly imaginative and original, weaving together fact and fiction, The Parihaka Woman 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 land confiscation. As her world is threatened, Erenora must find within herself the strength, courage and ingenuity to protect those whom she loves. And, like a Shakespearean heroine, she must change herself before she can take up her greatest challenge and save her exiled husband, Horitana.The Parihaka Woman is a wonderfully surprising, inventive and deeply moving riff on fact and fiction, history and imagination from one of New Zealand's finest and most memorable storytellers.

When Helen Kelly died in October 2016, with her partner by her side and a bunch of peonies by her bed, New Zealand lost an extraordinary leader. Kelly was the first female head of the country’s trade union movement, and much more: a visionary who believed that all workers, whether in a union or not, deserved fair treatment; a fighter from a deeply communist family who never gave up the struggle; a strategist and orator who invoked strong loyalty; a woman who stirred fierce emotions. Her battles with famous people were the stuff of headlines. She took on Peter Jackson, the country’s icon. She was accused in parliament of doing ‘irreparable damage’ to the union movement, and by employers of exploiting bereaved families of dead workers. While many saw her as a hero, to others she was ‘that woman’, a bloody pain in the neck.In this brilliant book, award-winning journalist Rebecca Macfie takes you not only into Kelly’s life but into a defining period in New Zealand’s history, when old values were replaced by the individualism of neo-liberalism, and the wellbeing and livelihood of workers faced unremitting stress. Through it all, Helen Kelly stood as an electrifying figure.

The New Zealand Wars were a series of conflicts that profoundly shaped the course and direction of New Zealand history. Fought between the Crown and various groups of Māori between 1845 and 1872, the wars touched many aspects of life in nineteenth-century New Zealand, even in those regions spared actual fighting. Physical remnants or reminders from these conflicts and their aftermath can be found all over the country, whether in central Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, or in more rural locations such as Te Pōrere or Te Awamutu. Vincent O'Malley provides a highly accessible introduction to the causes, events and consequences of the New Zealand Wars. The text is supported by extensive full-colour illustrations as well as timelines, graphs and summary tables.

A dazzling—and already prizewinning—collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of the personal—these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand, fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledgling music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life.As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in its observations of herself and the world around her. Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.