Category: NZ Fiction
A compulsive and chilling novel about subjugation, survival and the meaning of family. The car containing the four sleeping children left the earth. From the top of the wooded bluff, where the rain-slick road had curved so treacherously, down to the swollen river at the base of the cliff, was easily six ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
When secrets demand to be told . . . Two young women, a generation apart, travel to opposite sides of the world on fraught journeys of self-discovery. 1958: Gabrijela yearns to escape the confines of bleak post-war Yugoslavia and her tiny fishing community, but never imagines she will be exiled to New Z ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
Greta Jellings lives a small life. No expectation, no disappointment had been her mother’s mantra. It serves Greta well now too. At 30-something years of age she has spent her life pleasing others; working for the past 22 years in a pool-chemicals shop just one of the many compromises sh ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
This is what I want to do. I want to go home. I want you to come with me. 'I want to go from here . . .' Finger on Cape Reinga. '. . . to here.' Finger at the bottom of Stewart Island, right at the bottom of the map. It's been years since Alex was in New Zealand, and years since he spent any one-on-one ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
Then it is Saturday night and the team is partying, Priya's friends have evaporated and she isn't sure what to do. In the weeks after 'the incident' life seems to go on. But when whispers turn to confrontation, the institutions of wealth and privilege circle the wagons. Sprigs is the latest novel ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
Kara lives in Victory Park council flats with her young son, just making a living by minding other people’s kids – her nightly smoke on the fire escape the only time she can drop her guard and imagine something better. But the truth is life is threadbare and unpromising until the mysterious ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
One summer evening in 1942 Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband's wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech â and disappears. Three weeks later she turns up at an auction â packed inside one of ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
A compelling love story about facing one's demons, self-medication and finding the strength to carry on, even when it seems that all is lost. Almost qualified as an anaesthetic consultant, Rory McBride is adrift. Since a routine anaesthetic went horribly wrong, he has been plagued by sleeplessness, fla ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter. 'Chloe Lane's The Swimmers is by turns touching, resonate, fiercely candid, an ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction | Series: Text Classics
So the day promised fair, and the sea lay like a quilt with the waves tucked under, and the trees wavering like leafless water, cut to fit from a transparent block of blue air and frost. Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family: Francie, who is twelve and about to start work at the woollen mill ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
"The Bone People" is a love story. It begins when a mute six-year-old, full of blasting hurt and strange charm, wanders off the beach and into the home of a despairing artist. Kerwin has given up everything but drinking, thinking and fishing, but the arrival of the boy Simon, and later on, of his Maori ...Show more
Category: NZ Fiction
Fake Baby is a tender and funny exploration of the power of words, our perception of resilience and what it means to be real. Nine Days. One City. Three Oddballs. Stephen's dead father is threatening to destroy the world. If Stephen commits the ultimate sacrifice and throws himself into the harbour, he ...Show more