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Stay connected to the world of books in New Zealand with the lively mix of news and views on books, writers and writing served up in our quarterly members’ magazine. Read the latest issue online now.

Gifted | Patrick Evans

One day in 1955 the ‘father of New Zealand fiction’ finds a young woman on his doorstep. 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 moving novel.
(Victoria University Press, September 2010)

Quinine | Kelly Ana-Morey

Vienna, 1903: 33-year-old Marta Mueller, natural historian and artist, meets Bernard Schmidt, a copra planter from German East Neuguinea. Marta longs to travel the world and a few months later she is married and sailing for the Pacific. She must find her feet, and herself, far from her family during her marriage and, later, the British-Australian conquest and formation of Papua New Guinea.
(Huia, September 2010)

Settlers' Creek | Carl Nixon

Box Saxton just wants to bury his teenage stepson in the churchyard near the farm where Box grew up, but the boy's biological father, a Maori leader, turns up and forcibly takes the body. According to custom the boy must be buried in the ancestral cemetery and legally there is little Box can do. With no plan and little hope, Box gets in his old truck and drives north, desperate and heartbroken.
(Random House, September 2010)

All That We Remember | Zoe Adams

When a young woman loses her memory after a traumatic car accident, she decides to recuperate in her palatial family home which is about to be sold. But instead of the peace she is seeking, she begins to relive someone else's memories of the house. As the tension builds, her trust in both old and new relationships is tested, and tragic secrets begin to surface.
(Harper Collins, September 2010)

Villa Pacifica | Kapka Kassabova

Writer Ute and her husband Jerry arrive in a dead-end coastal village in South America. At Villa Pacifica, a hotel cum animal sanctuary run by eccentric ex-pats, they are joined by an assortment of travellers all looking for something out of the ordinary. An ever-present air of sensuality and danger haunts this visceral, gripping story from one of our most talented writers.
(Penguin, September 2010)

A Foreign Country | Anna Caro & Juliet Buchanan (Eds)

Strange creatures are loose in Miramar, desperate survivors cling to the remains of a submerged country, and the residents of Gisborne reluctantly serve alien masters. A Foreign Country brings together the work of established authors and fresh voices to showcase the range of stories produced by New Zealand's growing community of speculative fiction writers.
(Random Static, September 2010)

Sons for the Return Home | Albert Wendt

Popular Penguin Edition: Samoan-born Albert Wendt was working as a teacher in Samoa when he wrote this autobiographical novel, first published in 1973. It is the story of a cross-racial romance between a Samoan university student, the son of migrant parents, and the daughter of a wealthy palagi family. It was an instant bestseller and was later made into a successful movie.
(Penguin, September 2010)

The Scarecrow | Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Popular Penguin Edition: 'The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.' The greatest opening line in New Zealand literature opens this hilarious Gothic melodrama. Klynham is a sleepy little town in which not a lot happens. But then one moonlit night the Scarecrow arrives, swilling brandies and looking for victims. Something sordid and even macrabre lies ahead.
(Penguin, September 2010)

Pounamu, Pounamu | Witi Ihimaera

Popular Penguin Edition: first published in 1972, Pounamu, Pounamu introduced an exciting new voice into New Zealand literature. Most of Witi Ihimaera's stories, based on the East Coast, describe a traditional rural, communal way of life facing huge pressures from the drift by many Maori to the cities. This was to be a constant theme in Ihimaera's future writing.
(Penguin, September 2010)

Mutuwhenua | Patricia Grace

Popular Penguin Edition: Ripeka leaves her family and traditional lifestyle to marry Graeme, a Pakeha schoolteacher. In the strange world of the city, she finds that she cannot make the break from her whanau, that the old ways are too strong. The first novel by a Maori woman ever published is a powerful, moving story of contrasts between old and new, young and old, Maori and Pakeha.
(Penguin, September 2010)

Live Bodies | Maurice Gee

Popular Penguin Edition: as a young man in the 1930s, Josef battled the Nazis on the streets of Vienna. He fled to New Zealand, only to be interned as a dangerous enemy. After the war, he rebuilt his life and married Nancy. Despite his success, Josef still stands askew from his times. The past has become a place in which to escape and perhaps resolve the troubles of the present.
(Penguin, September 2010)

Let the River Stand | Vincent O’Sullivan

Popular Penguin Edition: in the deceptively quiet Waikato of the 1930s and 1940s, a number of lives connect in a complex web of family ties, desire and violence. The events of this story also take in boxing, farming, devotion and perversion, ranging as far as Tasmania and the Spanish Civil War.
(Penguin, September 2010)

Hang on a Minute Mate | Barry Crump

Popular Penguin Edition: in this sequel to the bestselling A Good Keen Man, Sam Cash, an engaging, yarn-spinning vagabond, takes young Jack Lilburn under his wing on a roundabout journey. They drift from job to job – forestry, horse-breaking, fencing, mustering, farming – but equally important to the story are the tall tales and qualities of Sam himself, hard-case humorist and jack-of-all-trades.
(Penguin, September 2010)

The Garden Party & Other Stories | Katherine Mansfield

Popular Penguin Edition: innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience.
(Penguin, September 2010)

The Book of Fame | Lloyd Jones

Popular Penguin Edition: in 1905 a motley group of young New Zealand rugby players sets out by steamer on a journey to the other side of the world. Their exploits on the field across the British Isles are staggering. The next year they are back, and their fame has spread before them across three continents. Winner of the 2001 Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana Awards.
(Penguin, September 2010)

All Visitors Ashore | C. K. Stead

Popular Penguin Edition: in the foreground is a set of bizarre characters, all of whom seem bent on escaping from New Zealand into a larger world. The 1951 waterfront lockout is on, the harbour is full of cargo vessels, but passenger ships continue to sail. One by one or two by two the characters in the novel depart, leaving just Curl Skidmore alone on Takapuna Beach.
(Penguin, September 2010)

The Graphologist’s Apprentice | Whiti Hereaka

January is bored in her life, unhappy and friendless, and she is absorbed in a fantasy romance she has invented with a married man. Through a newspaper advertisement, January befriends Mae, an elderly graphologist looking to pass on her skills in analysing handwriting, and she is suddenly brought back to reality.
(Huia, August 2010)

The Collector's Dream | Pierre Furlan

A holidaying writer becomes entranced by the story of two great New Zealand eccentrics: Franklin Bodmin, a genius inventor who became an entrepreneur in America; and Will Bodmin, who became an unorthodox Jungian art therapist in England and one of the greatest ever collectors of documents and works of art relating to the South Pacific. (Translated from French by Jean Anderson)
(Victoria University Press, August 2010)

Lives of the Poets | John Newton

In poems that range from lyric to satire, and from formalist set-pieces to extended verse narrative, this long-awaited follow-up to John Newton’s 1985 debut Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado charts a journey through the backblocks of Romanticism and through fractured contemporary landscapes of writing and feeling.
(Victoria University Press, August 2010)

Koiwi Koiwi: Bone Bone | Hinemoana Baker

In this second collection from one of New Zealand’s most exciting rising poets, Hinemoana Baker amplifies what’s usually whispered, magnifies the microscopic and x-rays the mundane.
(Victoria University Press, August 2010)

Dear Sweet Harry | Lynn Jenner

This debut collection links Jenner’s own family history with that of two famous deceivers, Harry Houdini and Mata Hari, and assembles factions and ephemera, poems and scraps that summon other diverse characters, objects and places: France, ham radio, World War I, trains, TB, her grandfather Harry, Katherine Mansfield and Paraparaumu.
(Auckland University Press, July 2010)

Man for All Seasons | David Grant

The Life and Times of Ken Douglas: raised in a hardworking, tough-talking, union-focussed Wellington family, Douglas got into union politics as a very young working man. This powerful biography explores the man who was there during the union movement's most powerful days and watched its emasculation.
(Random House, September 2010)

The Great Wrong War | Stevan Eldred-Grigg

For New Zealand, WWI was wholly avoidable, wholly unnecessary and almost wholly disastrous. Eldred-Grigg believes the enormous cost of the war was way too high - and that we still feel the effects, socially and culturally, today. His narrative non-fiction goes against the accepted line and gives us a fascinating, new look into our social history before, during and just after WWI.
(Random House, September 2010)

Strictly Kiwi | Graham Hutchins

Many items of popular culture, which we call Kiwiana, show our style, imagination, national character and sometimes bad taste. From Kiwifruit and L&P to jandals and swanndris; bungy jumping and marching girls to buzzy bees and the A&P show, this book looks at the history and amusing stories behind our national icons and favourite things.
(Hachette, September 2010)

Honouring the Contract | John E. Martin

Government policy is linked to an evolving ‘social contract’ between wage earners and the state. Martin provides a novel perspective on the distinctive foundations of New Zealand’s welfare state, and raises issues concerning modern-day concepts of citizenship as the welfare state comes under challenge.
(Victoria University Press, September 2010)

The Power of Mothers | Celia Lashlie

A look at the intergenerational cycle of crime and criminal families and the women who have the power to change things. Lashlie examines the issues underlying youth crime statistics, the background of infamous cases of child abuse and violent crime and the way in which we as a society have traditionally handled children born into families caught up in crime, poverty and abuse.
(HarperCollins, September 2010)

Hidden in Front of Us | Anthea Simcock

Whenever a child is harmed at the hands of an adult there is almost always another saying, I knew that child was in trouble. Here adults share their experiences of being those children. Their stories are woven through Anthea's insights from working with children at risk.
(Maruki Books Ltd, September 2010)

Letters from the Bay of Islands | Marianne Williams

In 1822, Marianne Williams, her missionary husband Henry and their three children, left England for the Bay of Islands. Their new home was a remote settlement in Paihia among Maori tribes, with European whaling crews across the bay. These letters show her courage and uncomplaining determination, describing the hardships and joys of daily life and the family's relationship with Maori.
(Penguin, September 2010)

An Afternoon in Summer | Kathy Guiffre

Kathy Giuffre wants to escape her stressful life, so when a new boyfriend agrees to join her for a year in Rarotonga with her sons, she takes a sabbatical from work and books their flights. Then at the last minute her boyfriend announces he isn't coming. In captivating style Giuffre tells what happens when she finds herself alone with her boys 11,000kms from home.
(Awa, September 2010)

Battlefields of the New Zealand Wars | David Green

A Visitor’s Guide: The New Zealand Wars of the 19th century still cast a long shadow. Three decades of fighting across the North Island ensured Pakeha rule, but also enabled Maori survival. This guidebook takes a journey of discovery through the history that surrounds us, locating and describing the battefields and bringing to life the bitter struggles that occurred.
(Penguin, September 2010)

The Last Everyday Hero | Richard Boock

The Bert Sutcliffe Story: this is a tale of two men: one who became the first hero of New Zealand cricket, and one whose lifelong dream was to write his biography. Cricketing writer Richard Boock completes the story begun by Richard Nye, who died in 2004 but left behind a treasure trove of research on the remarkable batsman, much of it never heard before.
(Longacre, August 2010)

Escape to the Pole | Kevin Biggar

The comic sequel to 'The Oarsome Adventures of a Fat Boy Rower' puts a modern human face on a classic adventure story. One hundred years ago Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to claim the last great geographic prize, the South Pole. It was an epic battle, a life or death struggle. Now, a century later, adventurer Kevin Biggar knows how they feel.
(Random House, August 2010)

The Years Before My Death | David McPhail

Memories of a Comic Life: the much loved actor-director and writer recounts his early life and what led him to pioneer satirical TV programmes such as A Week of It and McPhail and Gadsby, what drove him to perform comedy, and what was behind his desire to make us laugh.
(Longacre, August 2010)

A Long Road to Progress | Richard Hall

As Commander of the New Zealand troops in the Bamiyan Province of Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Hall gained a unique insight into the lives of Kiwi soldiers serving in a harsh climate amid daily threats, and into the lives of the locals. He vividly and movingly recalls his experiences, and explains the vision he tried to implement on behalf of this country.
(Random House, August 2010)

Rebel With A Cause | Ray Avery

From an orphanage childhood and teen life on the streets, Ray Avery went on to become a scientist, a millionaire, a hugely successful businessman and New Zealander of the Year for his work in the Third World.
(Random House, August 2010)

Out There: South | Chris Morton

a 4WD Adventure in New Zealand's South Island: this is the record of a four-wheel drive adventure through some of the most spectacular country to be found in the South Island, undertaken by leading photographers Chris Morton and Tony Bridge.
(Craig Potton Publishing, August 2010)

King Potatau | Pei Te Harinui

An Account of the Life of Potatau Te Wherowhero: detailing the background to the Kingitanga, this book tells the story of the first king, Potatau Te Wherowhero. Using a Maori voice employing waiata, poetry and whakapapa as well as prose text in English and English translations, it is accessible to both Maori language speakers and those with no knowledge of Maori.
(Huia, August 2010)