In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds left by its absence, Once Were Warriors is a masterpiece of unblinking realism, irresistible energy, and great sorrow.

    I felt it though. I let out an incredible whoop of joy and skipped into the air, laughing and laughing; there was so much joy inside me. For the first time in all my memory, I could not contain myself.As a boy in the early 1940s, young Boden Black finds his life changed for ever the day his neighbour Dudley drives him over the hills into the vast snow-covered plains of the Mackenzie country. Unexpectedly his world opens up and he discovers a love of landscape and a fascination with words that will guide him throughout his life, as he forges a career as a butcher and poet, spends a joyous summer building a hut on the slopes of Mount Cook and climbs to the summit in the company of Sir Edmund Hillary.A moving exploration of onw man's journey and the events which shape him, The Hut Builder is also an evocative celebration of the mountain world and the wonder of life.

    This remarkable, award-winning novel is both a tribute to some of the world's first sporting celebrities and an investigation into the curious workings of fame.Not just a book for lovers of sport, The Book of Fame is essentially a story about friendship and loyalty, and about a group of astonishing young men at the peak of their abilities.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Novel About My Wife is narrated by Tom Stone as he searches through the mysteries his wife has left him with. The reader is left to discover what dark thing has come between him and his beloved partner.Tom Stone is, as well as being cheerfully neurotic, madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Pushing forty and newly pregnant, they buy their first house in Hackney. It seems they are moving into a settled future, despite spiralling money troubles. But Ann is dogged by a local homeless man whose constant presence comes to feel like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses Ann finds solace in her new friendship with Kate, a woman Tom is both repelled by and peculiarly drawn to. Their home is beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. Is this normal for London, or is the measure of normality in this city actually mad?Novel About My Wife is Tom’s effort to understand this woman he has been so blindly in love with, and to peel back the past to see where the real threats in their lives were hiding. It is an investigation of guilt, love, forgiveness, and the perils of forgetting.She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies, the kind who turn the sight of their ass in broad daylight into a state secret. (God, you just find yourself dying for a glimpse, you’ll do anything to get it, hover outside the bathroom door, hide under a table, pull back the sheets when she’s sleeping. Then because of all the mystery you end up, when you’re finally feasting your eyes, thinking, ‘hey, maybe she has got something to worry about.’) Ann didn’t care. Her body was open for viewing. It was one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.--from Novel About My Wife

    But Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. This book tells the story of three generations of the Stilton family.

    Sometimes, it is Hemi, a man who was laid off from his job and realizes that this situation affords him the opportunity to reconnect with the land, his culture and his family. Other times, Toko is the narrator. Toko is Hemi's adopted son and is physically handicapped. However, he also has a sixth sense and can see events before they occur. Mostly, though, the story is told by Roimata, Hemi's wife and Toko's adoptive mother. She relates the growing concern the Maori have about developers coming into their land, and their quiet, concerted efforts to rebel. She details their successes and many painful failures in a sparse, simple prose. The book does not really have a true resolution; instead, Patricia Grace outlines the cultural differences that exist in New Zealand, and the uses and abuses of power, and how it can affect a people.

    Ngati Wai chief Paratene Te Manu spends long sessions, over three long days, having his portrait painted by the Bohemian painter Gottfried Lindauer. Hearing of Lindauer's planned trip to England reminds him of his own journey there, twenty years earlier, with a party of northern rangatira. As he sits for Lindauer, Paratene retreats deeper and deeper into the past, from the triumphs in London and their meetings with royalty to the disintegration of the visit into poverty, mistrust, and humiliation. Based on a true story.

    When one of Daphne's sisters dies, a crisis is provoked that leads Daphne to a mental asylum where she receives shock treatment. Her voice from "the Dead Room" haunts the novel with its poetic insights.

    And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' Roza Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the Prime Minister's wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm, but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives. Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. Sharp, moving, brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at once a meditation on power and politics, and an intensely humane look at the choices people make as they struggle, against the odds, to maintain love and integrity in their lives.

    Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.But Ārama is braver than he looks, and he has a friend and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sorrow. As long as there’s aroha to give and stories to tell and a good supply of plasters.Here is a novel that is both raw and sublime, a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction. Haere mai, Becky Manawatu.

    In a right-wing coup one man, Volkner, has seized power in New Zealand and is using army and special police to maintain his government. Smith's Dream forces us to imagine such a situation and to ask ourselves: Where would you stand? How far would you go?

    It is a set text in most New Zealand courses in universities, and is often grossly misrepresented as a kind of celebration of the Kiwi bloke going it alone, getting offside with the law and women, and making a fist of it on his own terms. It also has been glibly accused of misogyny and racism. For all its local emphases and colour, the novel must be read in the context of post-war Europe, as it takes a hard look at the reality of ‘ordinary’ life, without the self-congratulatory assurances common to both British and New Zealand conservatism. The starkness of the novel is also a philosophical one. Such values as emerge are what the individual manages to put together as the historical moment allows—fiction as existentialism, before such a term became modish. At the same time as he was working on the novel, Mulgan edited for Victor Gollancz Poems of Freedom, an anthology of poets who ‘were unafraid’, and whom W.H. Auden, in his Introduction, valued not for their wisdom, but for raising their voices against oppression.

    Tamihana is the leader of the great Mahana family of shearers and sportsmen. Rupeni Poata is his arch-enemy. They will fight to win the title of Bulibasha and be proclaimed the King of the Gypsies, Caught in the middle of this struggle for power is the grandson of Tamihana and his wife Ramona, the teenage Simeon. 2 cassettes.

    Her mother was a New Zealander, her father a Polish Jew who had jumped off a train to the Treblinka death camp and hidden from the Nazis until the end of the war. When Diana was 13 she moved to New Zealand with her mother, sister and brother. Her father was to follow.Diana never saw him again.Many years later she sets out to discover what happened to him. The search becomes an obsession as she painstakingly uncovers information about his large Warsaw family and their fate at the hands of the Nazis, scours archives across the world for clues to her father’s disappearance, and visits the places he lived.This unforgettable narrative is also a deep reflection on the meaning of family, the trauma of loss, and the insistence of memory. It asks the question: Is it better to know, or more bearable not to?

    But then, it is Ma who is the cause of the most troubling question of all, the one Frankie can never bring himself to ask. When a new girl arrives at school — a daring free spirit with unavoidable questions of her own — Frankie’s carefully guarded world begins to unravel, leading him to a painful confrontation with the ultimate 10 p.m. question. Deftly told with humor, poignancy, and an endearing cast of characters, The 10 P.M. Question will touch everyone who has ever felt set apart.