What happens when an old man wakes up one morning and finds that everything around him now fills with revulsion? What happens when Faleasa Osovae, the highest ranking alii in the village of Maalaelua, feigns madness and throws away his responsibilities as a chief?Albert Wendt is a Samoan, this novel plays in Samoa and gives a good feel for the Samoan way of life and gives also an idea how New Zealand affected it.

    The ensuing events unfold with stark brutality amidst a seldom-seen New Zealand cityscape of littered streets reflected in rain puddles and crowded speeding highways and noisy smoke-filled bars, a world of inarticulate turmoil.

    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 was also the first to introduce a full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. This title tells that story in all its colour and drama. The narrative that emerges is an inclusive one about men and women, Maori and Pakeha. It shows that British motives in colonizing New Zealand were essentially humane; and that Maori, far from being passive victims of a "fatal impact", coped heroically with colonization and survived by selectively accepting and adapting what Western technology and culture had to offer. The latter part of the book reveals how an insulated and dependent British colony transformed itself into an independent nation, open to and competing with technological and cultural influences sweeping the globe.

    Alice’s imaginary friend, Simp, has shown up, with a running commentary on her failings. ‘I mean, can you even calculate the square root of 762 anymore?’ The last time Simp was here was when Alice was seven, on the night a fire burned down the family home. Now Simp seems to be plotting something.When Alice meets a wealthugee named Pablo, she thinks she’s found a way out of her dull existence. But then she meets Pablo’s teenage daughter, Erika – an actual genius full of terrifying ambition.She’s a Killer is the story of a brilliant and stubborn slacker who is drawn into a radical action. It’s about what happens when we refuse to face our most demanding problems, told by a woman who is a strange and calculating force of chaos.‘A claustrophobic eco-thriller with a gloriously unreliable narrator, She’s a Killer is tense and sharp, and feels unnervingly prescient.’ –Brannavan Gnanalingam‘Equipped with an exhilaratingly badly-behaved protagonist, She’s a Killer builds from a slice of very strange life into a thriller by way of a succession of stunning comic set pieces. You’ll laugh—a lot. And then you’ll cry and be really surprised about it since you were laughing so much.’ –Elizabeth Knox

    Until now.Part memoir, part essay collection, Megan Dunn’s ingenious, moving, hilariously personal Things I Learned at Art School tells the story of her early life and coming-of-age in New Zealand in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.From her single mother's love life to her Smurf collection, from the mean girls at school to the mermaid movie Splash, from her work in strip clubs and massage parlours (and one steak restaurant) to the art school of the title, this is a dazzling, killer read from a contemporary voice of comic brilliance.Chapters include (but are not limited to): The Ballad of Western Barbie; A Comprehensive List of All the Girls Who Teased Me at Western Heights High School, What They Looked Like and Why They Did It; On Being a Redhead; Life Begins at Forty: That Time My Uncle Killed Himself; Good Girls Write Memoirs, Bad Girls Don’t Have Time; Videos I Watched with My Father; Things I Learned at Art School; CV of a Fat Waitress; Nine Months in a Massage Parlour Called Belle de Jour; Various Uses for a Low Self-esteem; Art in the Waiting Room and Submerging Artist.

    He traces an intimate history of the Dunedin Sound—that distinctive jangly indie sound that emerged in the seventies, heavily influenced by punk—and the record label Flying Nun.As well as the pop culture of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Carter writes candidly of the bleak and violent aspects of Dunedin, the city where he grew up and would later return. His childhood was shaped by violence and addiction, as well as love and music. Alongside the fellow musicians, friends and family who appear so vividly here, this book is peopled by neighbours, kids at school, people on the street, and the other passing characters who have stayed on in his memory.We also learn of the other major force in Carter’s life: sport. Harness racing, wrestling, basketball and football have provided him with a similar solace, even escape, as music.Dead People I Have Known is a frank, moving, often incredibly funny autobiography; the story of making a life as a musician over the last forty years in New Zealand, and a work of art in its own right.

    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' ...

    En route she discards section after section of her manuscript in the spirit of editing The Ice Shelf into a stronger, sleeker work of literature.The Ice Shelf is an electrifying allegory for the dangers of wasting love and other non-renewable resources.

    Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

    'Writers take what we learn of human nature and, fuelled by our longings for other existences and other times, forge new identities that can be as real as she is, sitting with her dog on the weathered step of the old house, stories that move us to tears or laughter.' Merle Carbury, an author in her own right, also teaches Creative Writing. Amid the tension of the final semester of the year, her many and varied students prepare to submit their manuscripts. As Merle mentors their assorted ambitions, observes the romantic entanglements of her colleague, worries about her husband and is intrigued by their mysterious German lodger, she both imparts and embodies how to write a novel. Written by a prize-winning author, who is also an experienced teacher, the overarching intelligence, compassion and wicked humour in this inventive book make it a joy to read.

    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.

    As reported by a much-followed columnist and awarded journalist, these rich, fascinating, and occasionally disturbing stories of settlements follow people living throughout New Zealand, from Kawakawa in the north to Mosgiel in the south, and Samoa and Antarctica overseas. Funny, moving, and at times terrifying, this book provides a platform from which New Zealand reveals itself and proves that rarely are people and places as they first appear.

    The sight of a spam ad for ‘lonely Asian women looking for fun’ becomes a moment of profound realisation that she, too, is but a lonely Asian woman looking for fun. Paula's new outlook leads her to shoplift a cheesecake-laden supermarket trolley. The trolley contains an unexpected attachment. Lonely Asian Woman is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world. Instead, Lam defies the expected and leads the reader and her characters to a deft climax against the grain of the titular lonely Asian woman.

    She swallowed hard and looked out of her cabin window. The plane had just broken through a clump of clouds and below was an undulating patchwork of reds and greens. It was what she’d been expecting. The ruralness. Yet also different from the image she’d held in her head. The vastness. The intense terracotta colour. The relentless blue of the sky.’Greta Jellings blushes and bumbles her way through her carefully ordered existence, forever constrained by what her mother would have said and done. No expectation, no disappointment was one of her mother’s mantras. It serves Greta well too. It is the death of her dear friend Walter, and his unusual bequest, that finally forces Greta to escape the shackles of her safe life. Revealed in a series of letters, Walter has set Greta a challenge that leads her across the world, and so far outside her comfort zone, that she has no choice but to confront who she really is. It is in the foreignness of strangers that she finds the familiar, and in the expanse of the vista that she gains perspective.'Addressed to Greta' is a captivating novel about a woman learning to express her true self. A story about finding the courage to be seen, and a testament to the transformative power of friendship.