In the Clearing by J. P. Pomare

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Amy has only ever known what life is like in the Clearing. She knows what's expected of her. She knows what to do to please her elders, and how to make sure life in the community remains happy and calm. That is, until a new young girl joins the group. She isn't fitting in; she doesn't want to stay. What happens next will turn life as Amy knows it on its head. Freya has gone to great lengths to feel like a 'normal person'. In fact, if you saw her go about her day with her young son, you'd think she was an everyday mum. That is, until a young girl goes missing and someone from her past, someone she hasn't seen for a very long time, arrives in town. As Amy and Freya's story intertwines the secrets of the past bubble up to the surface. This rural Aussie town's dark underbelly is about to be exposed and lives will be destroyed. ...Show more

The Father of Octopus Wrestling by Frankie McMillan

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Darkly comic, surreal and full of perceptiveness about human vulnerability and eccentricity, Frankie McMillan's small fictions often duck and dive away from the reader's expectations.With a poet's sense of how single words or phrases ripple out with alternate meanings, and a dramatist's feeling for how apparently small gestures reveal character, and how sudden, cataclysmic change can wrench us out of comfort, routine and unthinking assumptions, the author leaves us ransacking the language for finer genre definitions.This collection teems with both the animal world and a vivid circus of quirky human individuals. The pieces globe-trot all over the planet: from Russia to America to New Zealand; and yet often their piquant wisdom comes from how they bear down into 'micro-geography' of intimate relationships: the troughs, peaks, cliff-sides, the warm, still pools of recognition.Frankie McMillan is like a quietly outrageous Zen master, showing us human folly and idiocy, steering us carefully over the dark river of vulnerability that swells under it all.'The Father of Octopus Wrestling, and other small fictions' is an artisan production, designed and printed by Ilam Press, Ilam School of Fine Arts. ...Show more

All About Kate by Josie Laird

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

When you hate your body, how can you love yourself - or anybody else? Life is nearly perfect for Kate; the perfect boyfriend and the perfect job. But whatever Luke says, she knows she is too fat. And now, her birth mother has decided to come looking for her. What surprises will that bring?

Loving Sylvie by Elizabeth Smither

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

A sensual, witty novel that weaves together the stories of three women, beautifully written by one of our most clever wordsmiths. Sylvie rows across a lake to her wedding. Madeleine flees to Paris and works in Le Livre Bleu bookshop. Isobel is summoned to her doctor's surgery late one afternoon. Elizabe th Smither takes us into the richly imagined worlds of three women - Sylvie, her mother Madeleine and grandmother Isobel. The narrative shifts between the three women in three different cities: Auckland, Paris and Melbourne. Elizabeth tells their stories with warm, deeply observant humour, through their love affairs, rivalries, marriages and all the beautiful minutiae of everyday life. She draws the threads together subtly and surprisingly to achieve a perfectly resolved ending. Described as having 'a gift for wry comedy combined with an eye for pinpoint detail', Elizabeth is one of New Zealand's finest writers. ...Show more

Moonlight Sonata by Eileen Merriman

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

A bitter-sweet novel of forbidden love and family secrets. 'Some secrets should never be told.' It's the annual New Year family get-together. Molly is dreading having to spend time with her mother, but she is pleased her son will see his cousins and is looking forward to catching up with her brothers . . . Joe in particular. Under the summer sun, family tensions intensify, relationships become heightened and Molly and Joe will not be the only ones with secrets that must be kept hidden. 'No one must ever know.' ...Show more

The Alexandrite by Dione Jones

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Who is the stranger found dead in the woods, outside Pamela Lady Scawton's family home? Why was he carrying a stone that changes colour and a threatening letter?      The quest leads from World War One to the present day and from an English village to New Zealand farmland, to discover ho w past events are intertwined with the present. To unravel the mystery Pamela is forced to confront truths that shatter her beliefs about her family and their place in the world.    ​  The Alexandrite is a story of class conflict, hidden sins, and deceit. ...Show more

Meivara's Light Magic by Kirsty Canillo

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

From a Shadow Grave by Andi Buchanan

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

It is said that her ghost still haunts the Mount Victoria Tunnel. These are the stories she was denied. In 1931, seventeen-year-old Phyllis Symons was attacked by her lover and left to die in the construction site of the Mount Victoria Tunnel. From a Shadow Grave picks up the threads of history and expl ores three alternate ways Phyllis's story might have ended, weaving together historical fiction, urban fantasy and time travel. This is no ordinary ghost story its the story of a young woman reclaiming her life rather than letting her murder be her legacy. ...Show more

The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell by Sandra Arnold

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Losing her daughter to the Christchurch earthquake sends Lily back to her childhood village in Northern England to scatter Charlie's ashes. It's a place of ghosts for Lily after the mysterious drowning of a school friend at the old village well - a tragedy somehow linked to the death of a local woman ac cused of witchcraft three hundred years earlier. Now Lily's back, she wants to find out what happened at the well and the truth behind the swift departure of her friend Israel. The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell spans three centuries and three countries, exploring the love and history that makes a community, and the hate and secrets that can destroy it. ...Show more

The Everrumble by Michelle Elvy

$10.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

"Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began."--Cover. ...Show more

The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Erica is 17 and in her last year of high school. Donny is 42 and everywhere in her yoga class, at German Club, in her parents spare room . . . The story of a young woman who finds herself subject to the gravitational field of a charismatic man, The Boyfriend is a cautionary tale about blindly accepting traditional love narratives. This clear-eyed, dismaying and often hilarious examination of sexual desire, trauma and growth is a remarkable debut and a perfect novel for our time. ...Show more

The Burning River by Lawerence Patchett

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

In a radically changed Aotearoa New Zealand, Van's life in the swamp is hazardous. Sheltered by Rau and Matewai, he mines plastic and trades to survive. When a young visitor summons him to the fenced settlement on the hill, he is offered a new and frightening responsibilitya perilous inland journey that leads to a tense confrontation and the prospect of a rebuilt world. ...Show more