The Shag Incident by Stephanie Johnson

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Winner, Duetz Medal, Montana New Zealand Book Awards, 2003 The people who committed the act of revenge in 1985 thought it was perfectly executed. Twenty years on the truth is revealed, the truth about the deception that started it all and the seemingly disparate characters involved: Jasper, currently in Sydney's Long Bay Prison; psychiatrist Franca Todisco; New Zealand journalist Richard Brunel visiting Paris with society girlfriend Michaela; Lena now living on Waiheke Island with her girlfriend Scottie; and the young biographer Melody Argyle, working on a life of her intensely private subject, ex-All Black and millionaire block-buster novelist Howard Shag. What happened that connects them? The Shag Incident is a novel about love, responsibility, guilt and revenge. Comic, savage, and multi-layered, this is a provocative extension to this versatile writer's oeuvre. Darkly satirical and wickedly funny, this novel takes a tilt at a range of contemporary matters, including sexual stereotyping, militant feminism, the machismo of the All Blacks, new age beliefs, psychiatry, womb burial and naming ceremonies. ...Show more

Blindsight - A Novel by Maurice Gee

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

'Father taught us how not to love...' So begins Maurice Gee's latest novel of 'Wellington noir' (The Times). Narrated by Alice, as an old woman looking back over the mistakes and tragedy of her family history, Blindsight is a corruscating look at the evil we are capable of inflicting upon each other. At the heart of the story lies the strange relationship between Alice and her brother, Gordon, and the mystery behind their estrangement. Only ever afforded Alice's take on events, Gee masterfully contructs a tale of unreliability. As he traces these unhappy lives over a period of forty years, the narrative only gradually gives up the dark family secrets. Published by Faber for over thirty years, Maurice Gee was among ten of New Zealand's greatest living artists named by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Acclaimed in the Guardian for his 'terrifically entertaining fiction of villainy and betrayal, wry social history and deft political analysis' ... ...Show more

Sons for the Return Home by Albert Wendt

$10.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: good

Originally published in 1973, this story of star-crossed lovers spotlights the complex nature of love, freedom, and racism in New Zealand. Samoan writer Albert Wendt's first novel, Sons for the Return Home, has long been out of print. Yet, readers continue to respond to the clarity of vision in this sim ple, powerful story of cross-cultural encounter. ...Show more

Mango's Kiss by Albert Wendt

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Since the 1960s, Albert Wendt has created a profound and fabulous Pacific world that is uniquely his own. A fictional world focused on Samoa and New Zealand and reaching out to the centres of the world, a world inhabited by the richest menagerie of characters in Pacific fiction, characters whose lives a nd stories reflect our own complex depths. First published 2003. ...Show more

The Man in the Shed - Stories by Lloyd Jones

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

A boy watches his mother hooked and reeled ashore by a fisherman. A man builds a swing in the backyard to sit between his wife and her lover. A couple gives up their seat on a bus for lovers soon to be parted. A boy sees his mother come to life gliding on roller skates. Lloyd Jones's The Man in the Shed is a haunting collection of stories about family and longing. Jones's extraordinary tales take conventional family situations and tilts them sideways, delivering a memorable, beautiful blend of the suburban and the surreal. First published September 2009, Auckland Trade paperback Short stories ...Show more

Anno Domini 2000 or Woman's Destiny by Julius Vogel

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Before women even got the vote, this novel prophesied women presidents, prime ministers and leaders of the opposition. Before the Wright Brothers or Richard Pearse flew, it predicted global air travel. Before the Labour Party, it advocated social welfare and subsidised housing, and before the computer a nd email it foresaw a "noiseless telegraph".With Britain's Empire rampant and Home Rule in ruins, it anticipated a prosperous independent Ireland and attempted secession by Australia. As prophecy, Julius Vogel's 2000 came nearer the mark than George Orwell's 1984, according to Roger Robinson in his informative critical introduction to this special edition for the year 2000, the first new edition since the original was published in 1889. ...Show more

Dad Art by Damien Wilkins

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

It’s Wellington, now. Acoustic Engineer Michael Stirling’s old life is gone. He’s on the dating scene, learning te reo Maori, living in an upmarket apartment complex, and visiting his father who has dementia. Wearing his online dating disguise, Michael meets Chrissie, the widowed mother of a young son. Then his beloved adult daughter arrives from Auckland with a new attachment, an artist whose project will push them all towards key moments of risk and revelation. Dad Art is a vibrant, funny new work from the leading chronicler of contemporary life in Aotearoa. Told with great verve, this novel is about the capacity for surprise and renewal. ...Show more

Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology by Paul Mountfort & Rosslyn Prosser (eds)

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Scorchers is the first ever pan-Australasian anthology of climate fiction writings. Including pieces both by some of Australia and New Zealand’s most celebrated authors, its sixteen contributors have responded to a deceptively simple provocation: How can writers—and by implication literature—respond wit hin the short fiction format to the overwhelming reality of the climate crisis? The resulting collection of climate-fiction spans rural towns and futuristic metropolises, space stations and back gardens, familiar laneways and underground cities. Its themes of love, loss, despair and tentative hope transcend its immediate settings and speak urgently to the burning issue of our times. Works by Paul Mountfort, Rosslyn Prosser, Emma Ashmere, Moya Costello, Owen Everitt, James George, Patricia Grace, Rachel Hennessy , Matthew Hooton, Witi Ihimaera, Mike Johnson, Carol Lefevre, Renee Liang , Tulia Thompson, Deborah Wardle, Sean Williams, Alison Wong. ...Show more

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

$8.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: good

Lovelock including The Man From Nowhere - Berlin Diary by James McNeish

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Now a classic, this new edition of Lovelock is republished together with 'Berlin Diary', McNeish's journal written in Germany while researching the novel; and an afterword, which contains a sobering commentary on Lovelock's death. Jack Lovelock has been called the first modern athlete. He became famous internationally when he broke the world record to take the gold medal in the 1500 metres event at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. His unexpected victory against 'the greatest field of milers ever assembled' has all the hallmarks of a great discovery. A medical student, he treated his body as a human laboratory. Yet a mystery remains. In 1949 a few days before his 40th birthday, Jack Lovelock was killed when he fell beneath a train in New York. The enigma of his death becomes the key to McNeish's quest for the 'real' Lovelock - a man who in the author's words 'covered his traces as adroitly as he ran'. 'Lovelock', based on wide research but written as a fictional diary, was nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize. ...Show more

Acid Song by Bernard Beckett

$7.00 NZD

Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good

2009 Montana Book Awards FICTION Category Runner-up It's election day in New Zealand. A young father confronts a teenage burglar. A psychologist's political stand threatens to see him driven from the university community. A staffroom argument flares up - does a playground fight warrant a student's expul sion?. A young girl sets about mending her broken heart,a skinhead riot erupts and Richard,the biology lecturer at the heart of all these events must deal with the secret which drives them all. ...Show more

The Parihaka Woman by Witi Ihimaera

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

"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. /b>here has never been a New Zealand novel quite like The Parihaka Woman. Richly imaginative and original, weaving together fact a nd fiction, it 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." ...Show more