After definitively winning the 2009 season of Australian Idol at the age of 19, R&B sensation Stan Walker's career went from strength to strength. His first album, Introducing Stan Walker, went platinum in Australia and triple platinum in New Zealand; his second; From the Inside Out, debuted at number one on the New Zealand Albums Charts and number two on the ARIA charts. He's won multiple New Zealand Music Awards, been a judge on The X Factor NZ, and played starring roles in films Mt Zion and Born to Dance.Yet few knew what he had had to overcome reach these dizzying heights.Before Australian Idol, Walker had survived a childhood marred with poverty, domestic violence and sexual abuse; dabbled in crime and drug use; and suffered his own personal tragedy. For the first time, he speaks candidly about his rags-to-riches story - and the trials and tribulations he's had to deal with since.The trans-Tasman R&B superstar's raw and open memoir is a lesson that no matter how many setbacks, no matter the odds, you will succeed if you have the courage and belief to do so.

    Her best friend Iraia wants the same, but as the descendent of a slave, such things are barely conceivable to him. One summer as they approach adulthood, they notice that their friendship has changed, and that, if they are ever to experience freedom, they will need to travel beyond the isolation and safety of their Queen Charlotte Sound home.One hundred years later, twins Lula and Bigsy's birth is literally one in a million, as their mother Tui likes to tell people. But when Tui dies they learn there is much she kept secret, especially about their heritage. They too will need to travel beyond the world they have known, to an island they barely knew existed, at the eastern edge of New Zealand's Pacific realm.Neither Mere and Iraia, nor Lula and Bigsy are aware that someone else is part of their journeys. He does not watch over them so much as watch through them, feeling their loss and confusion as if it were his own.

    There are always parents to help through an incredible journey . . . I am, I know, a very lucky man.’Leading paediatrician Dr Simon Rowley has committed almost all of his working life to the care and wellbeing of children. In Mind That Child, Rowley provides a rare glimpse into what it means to be entrusted with the most precious of responsibilities – a young human life. Charting his decades of medical experience, Rowley touches on an array of issues, from the high-stakes management of tiny pre-term babies to the serious impacts of drugs, alcohol and technology on developing minds. Real-life cases and practical advice are interwoven throughout a candid, compassionate narrative.What’s revealed is a tender and profound portrait of a medical professional at the very centre of what matters – a doctor who always adopts a humane, holistic view and who writes openly about the personal impact of a career in medicine. A must-read for any parent and a wonderful insight into the high-pressure medical world.

    Their task is to map a rail route through an uncharted wilderness.They overcome the many obstacles posed by nature-bears, bees, bats, river crossings, cliff falls, impossible weather-but can they survive the treachery of their competitors?This is a fast-paced and charming novel. Its children are brave and competent but not always right. Its world is magical enough to be intriguing but close enough to our own to keep the reader on firm ground.

    From France to Russia, the 1830s to 1916 and the present day, Reginald Hill has crafted half a dozen tantalizing tales of the unexpected. He asks questions that will intrigue and gives answers that will astound.Featuring some of his best-loved characters, among them Joe Sixsmith and, of course, Dalziel and Pascoe, this is Reginald Hill at his devilish best.

    With no money, she's about to lose her gorgeous home, and her 'friends' no longer return her calls.Fate, in the unlikely form of her husband's reprobate uncle, intervenes. Determined to pursue gentle Miss Lillian, he leaves everything to tara's daughter, and moves into the local retirement village. With nowhere else to go, tara heads for a quiet life in Divine, as fast as her designer stilettos will take her.Instead there's the handsome dairy farmer she keeps clashing with, a scurrilous property developer, and a disgraceful incident at a PtA meeting. And mud. Lots of mud. With manure. When the mysterious Sian makes tara an unexpected offer, her life moves from slightly unhinged to hilariously bizarre - and the sleepy little town of Divine will never be the same ...

    As a young man, he possessed the rare gift of dream singing – the ability to see the future, but lost it through a selfish act. A seemingly chance crossing of paths with a thirteen year-old runaway boy who has witnessed a murder in a railroad dramatically changes both their destinies. Part love story, tragedy, and mystery, Dream Singer is a story of the betrayal of love, and the quest for redemption, where listening to dreams and the spirit of the land is vital to Elijah and boy staying ahead of the killer – and staying alive.

    Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her. Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.

    Many of these were between Slater and his personal allies on the hard right, revealing an ugly and destructive style of politics. But there were also many communications with the prime minister’s office and other Cabinet ministers in the National Government. They show us a side of Prime Minister John Key and his government of which most New Zealanders are completely unaware. Key has constructed an easy-going and relaxed public image, declaring to the public that ‘there’s no room for negative campaigning in New Zealand’. The reality is very different. His government has worked hand in hand with Slater and his collaborators in a sustained campaign of personal attacks against their political enemies, a deliberate but hidden strategy to avoid being held responsible for negative campaigning. Dirty Politics continues the story that began in Hager’s best-selling book The Hollow Men, investigating the way that underhand and deceptive politics poisons the political environment for everyone. If you care about integrity and ethics in politics, then this book will be disturbing but essential reading.

    She must decide whether to shelter the girl and endanger herself and her mother, or to tread the route of safety in the face of corruption and brutality she had thought left far behind in the years of her childhood.A fast-paced and beautifully told story of three women and the real meaning of courage.

    Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Maori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā - and other New Zealanders - curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Maori. A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pākehā and Maori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.

    

    In 1915, when he was 33, Baxter was arrested, sent to prison, then shipped under guard to Europe, where he was forced to the front line against his will. Punished to the limits of his physical and mental endurance, Baxter was stripped of all dignity, beaten, starved, and left for dead. In a final attempt to discredit him, authorities consigned him to a mental institution, an experience that would haunt him for the rest of his life.Against the backdrop of troops being mindlessly slaughtered at the whim of upper-echelon officers, We Will Not Cease is a story of extreme bravery and ultimate resolve. Archibald Baxter's lonely fight against the war to end all wars is a nightmare that Kafka could have penned -- except that the story is true.

    Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches. They volunteer at the Salvation Army shop, and sometimes they sleep with men for money. They live with Heidi and Dell, who are also like them.It’s 2006. Peggy and Greta have two jobs: a job at a call centre, and a job as a moderator for a website. They’re teaching themselves how to code. Heidi and Dell don’t live together anymore, and Dell keeps getting into trouble. One day, Peggy and Greta turn around and there’s only one of them.It’s 2018. Margaret lives next door to Heidi and her family. She has a job writing code that analyses data for a political organisation, and she’s good at it. Every day she checks an obsolete cellphone she found under her bed, waiting for messages. She struggles to stay sober. Then, one day, there are two of them again, both trying to figure out where they have come from. Nothing to See is a compelling, brilliantly original novel about life in the era of surveillance capitalism, when society prefers not to see those who are different, and the line between reality and simulation feels dissolvingly thin.

    No matter how hard you try.The body of a woman has been found on a pristine New Zealand beach – over a decade after she was murdered.Detective Matt Buchanan of the Auckland Police is certain it carries all the hallmarks of an unsolved crime he investigated 12 years ago: when Samantha Coates walked out one day and never came home.Re-opening the case, Buchanan begins to piece the terrible crimes together, setting into motion a chain of events that will force him to the darkest corners of society – and back into his deepest obsession… Sound of her Voice is an authentic, gritty, character-led police procedural by an elite former detective - for fans of Ian Rankin, Stuart Macbride, and Joseph Knox.