Stories from our Back Roads The South Island by Ray Stone

$50.00 NZD

Category: Pukapuka Aotearoa

This book is for people who enjoy driving and exploring the stories of our back roads, but most of all it is for people who love New Zealand, whether they choose to do it from behind the wheel of their SUV or the comfort of their sofa. Stories from our Backroads: South lsland will introduce you to some fascinating stories of, tracks, trails and back roads across the South Island. Many of them cross through forgotten parts of the country, and all of them have their own rich and exciting stories. Whether they follow the route of Maori foot trails or the path of early European settlers, each adds something to our history. For example, Ray drives the Danseys Pass Road before heading out onto the trails that cross the Oteake Conservation Park high above the Maniototo Plains. There he explores the huts and diggings left behind by the gold miners who flocked to the place in the 1860s, before heading back down to the old gold town of Naseby. ...Show more

Going by Train - The Complete New Zealand Railways Story by Graham Hutchins

$60.00 NZD

Category: Transport

Railways played a pivotal part in the development of New Zealand's economy, towns and cities, and helped shape a distinctive culture. This is a comprehensive account of our railways story, from the earliest days of the colony, through rail's growth and golden days, slow decline and recent resurgence. Go ing by Train details New Zealand's railway development from its beginnings to completion of the main trunk, provincial and urban networks and the numerous branch lines reaching far-flung corners of the country. By the 1930s and '40s, railways dominated travel and became part of the national way of life, with trains for all passengers and occasions. Graham Hutchins, who grew up in a railway town and spent many years working on the railways, recounts the locomotives, the lines, the people and personalities in rail's colourful history. With competition from road transport, rail's golden glow began to fade, with line closures, corporatisation and reduced investment. But with renewed interest, its time has come again, with growth in tourist and commuter travel, line redevelopment and heritage restoration. This fully illustrated work gives excellent coverage of local rail's tribulations, triumphs and tragedies, written in a very readable style. Rail fans and general readers alike will enjoy its wide-ranging topics, generous illustrations, anecdotes and personal accounts. ...Show more

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane

$30.00 NZD

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 d beautifully written. In this novel about a daughter's attempt to help her mother receive a merciful death, Lane has sidestepped the clichés, and captured the enigma of what it means to save a life by ending one.' — —Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question   ‘Chloe Lane's The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love – not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us to at once forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out.’ — Pip Adam, author Nothing To See ...Show more

Gottfried Lindauer's New Zealand: The Maori Portraits (Paperback Edition) by Ngahiraka Mason and Zara Stanhope (editors)

$60.00 NZD

Category: Pukapuka Aotearoa

An exquisite piece of art publishing that showcases Bohemian artist Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand in 75 plates and detailed contextual essays. From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, the Bohemian immigrant artist Gottfried Lindauer travelled to marae and rural towns around New Zealand a nd – commissioned by Māori and Pākehā – captured in paint the images of key Māori figures. For Māori then and now, the faces of tūpuna are full of mana and life. Now this definitive book on Lindauer’s portraits of the ancestors collects that work for New Zealanders.The book presents 67 major portraits and 8 genre paintings alongside detailed accounts of the subject and work, followed by essays by leading scholars that take us inside Lindauer and his world: from his artistic training in Bohemia to his travels around New Zealand as Māori and Pākehā commissioned him to paint portraits; his artistic techniques and deep relationship with photography; Henry Partridge’s gallery of Lindauer works on Queen Street in Auckland where Māori visited to see their ancestors; and the afterlife of the paintings in marae and memory. For Māori, the faces that look out from Lindauer’s portraits are tribal leaders and family members. They are tohunga and politicians. They are ancestors and friends. Gottfried Lindauer met Maori tūpuna at the most basic level of human connection by capturing their likeness. This book returns the ancestors and the artist to the people. ...Show more

Aspiring by Damien Wilkins

$23.00 NZD

Category: Young Adult

An engaging, funny and moving novel about a boy trying to make sense of it all. Fifteen-year-old Ricky lives in Aspiring, a town that’s growing at an alarming rate. Ricky’s growing, too — 6’7”, and taller every day. But he’s stuck in a loop: student, uncommitted baske tballer, and puzzled son, burdened by his family’s sadness. And who’s the weird guy in town with a chauffeur and half a Cadillac? What about the bits of story that invade his head? Uncertain what’s real — and who he is — Ricky can’t stop sifting for clues. He has no idea how things will end up . . . With sunlight, verve and humour, award-winning writer Damien Wilkins brings us a beguiling boy who’s trying to make sense of it all. ...Show more

Sixteen Days in Sikkim - Things to Do While Walking Downhill by Antony B. Shadbolt

$20.00 NZD

Category: Travel

Is It Bedtime Yet? Parenting ... the Hilarious, the Hair-raising, the Heart-breaking by Emily Writes

$35.00 NZD

Category: Parenting

A collection of writings on being a parent in Aotearoa - from hilarious to heart-breaking. The experience of parenthood is different for everyone. And every day can be different too. Read a hilarious and moving collection of perspectives from the well-loved Emily Writes and her friends. Some of them ar e experienced writers, others have put pen to paper for the first time. If it takes a village to raise a child, then this writing comes from the whole village. Yet every experience is a real one, and you will feel the joy, the horror, the love and the heart-ache as you read about birthday parties, vasectomies, hugs, hospitals and, of course, sleepless nights.                ...Show more

Ripiro Beach - A Memoir of Life after Near Death by Caroline Barron

$35.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

Does DNA write our destinies? Or do the hands that nurture triumph over nature? What is it that determines who we really are? Caroline Barron's father never found his birth mother. After he dies suddenly on her twentieth birthday, Caroline develops an insidious fear of her own untimely death. When she n early bleeds out on an operating table during childbirth, it almost seems her greatest fear is justified. Emerging from the experience a changed woman, Caroline spends the next six years poring over her family history in an attempt to make sense of her inexplicable rage. The family secrets she unearths threaten to destabilise her identity and carefully built life, eventually leading her to Northland's rugged Ripiro Beach, where past and present dramatically collide. Ripiro Beach is a beautifully written, relentlessly honest memoir about one woman's determination to gather the threads of a life that has come undone. ...Show more

We Can Make a Life: A Memoir of Family, Earthquakes and Courage by Chessie Henry

$35.00 NZD

Category: Biography / Memoir

Hours after the 2011 Christchuch Earthquake, Kaikoura-based doctor Chris Henry crawled through the burning CTV building to rescue those who were trapped. Six years later, his daughter Chessie interviews him in an attempt to understand the trauma that led her father to burnout, in the process unravellin g stories and memories from her own remarkable family history. Chessie rebuilds her family's lives on the page, from her parents honeymoon across Africa, to living in Tokelau as one of five children under ten before returning to New Zealand, where her mother would set her heart and home in the Clarence Valley only to see it devastated in the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake, and the family displaced. Written with the same love and compassion that defines her familys courage and strength, We Can Make a Life is an extraordinary memoir about the psychological cost of heroism, home and belonging, and how a family made a life together. ...Show more

Tohora: The Southern Right Whale (PB) by Ned Barraud

$20.00 NZD

Category: Animals

Once, the mighty tohora, or southern right whale, was a common sight in winter off the coast of Aotearoa. But it proved to be an easy target for the 19th-century whalers, and was soon driven to the edge of extinction. In the 20th century, however, it became a protected species, and once commercial whali ng was virtually stopped, the southern right whale made a comeback. Ned Barraud recounts this moving story in this beautifully illustrated book, a heartening and optimistic tale for every New Zealand child. ...Show more

New Zealanders: The Field Guide by Tom Sainsbury

$37.00 NZD

Category: Pukapuka Aotearoa

A revealing guide to the weird and wonderful inhabitants of New Zealand... and the places you'll find them. After years of mimicking various celebrities and stereotypes on his social media platforms, comedian Tom Sainsbury has now compiled his favourite New Zealand personalities into a book. This array of Kiwi heroes includes the useless farmhand that is forever jack-knifing the trailer, the martyr mother who guilt-trips her children, the officious office-worker who narks on the rest of the staff for low level misdemeanours, and the alpha-male teenager who loiters around Mount Maunganui every New Year's. All these descriptions are lovingly collated into a concise, easy-to-read field guide that'll give you a hilarious, in-depth insight into the people of Aotearoa. ...Show more

New Zealand's Native Trees (revised edition) by JOHN DAWSON ET AL

$130.00 NZD

Category: NZ Flora

New Zealand's Native Trees is a landmark book, the kind that is published only once in a generation. It celebrates our unique and magnificent native forests, and describes and generously illustrates more than 320 species, subspecies and varieties. This edition has been completely brought up-to-date with a significant number of botanical revisions, as many new species have been described or reclassified in the years since the book was first published. ...Show more