Book picks similar to
The Art of Walking Upright by Glenn Colquhoun


poetry
new-zealand
aotearoa-en-zed
box-3-reality-fiction

Missing Persons


Steve Braunias - 2021
    These are stories about how some New Zealanders go missing - the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Victory Park


Rachel Kerr - 2020
    But the truth is life is threadbare and unpromising until the mysterious Bridget moves in to the Park. The wife of a disgraced Ponzi schemer, she brings with her glamour and wild dreams and an unexpected friendship. Drawn in, Kara forgets for a moment who she’s there to protect.

Such is HER Life


Reecha Agarwal Goyal - 2018
    . .And maybe never as a human.Get ready . . . it’s time to unlearn and learn.A collection of musings that will have you reeling in a wave of emotion long after you are done reading, this powerhouse of work will make you smile, cry, go red in anger, nod your head in agreement and grasp the finer nuances of what it means to be her in today’s world.A SMALL BOOK OF BIG LEARNINGS.About the AuthorReecha Agarwal Goyal holds an MBA in marketing and finance from Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Chennai. She has worked as a Wealth Manager in one of the reputed MNCs for six months before getting married in Delhi. Literature has always fascinated her and she has an undying passion for words. She believes that it is her kids, Aanya and Ayansh, who have brought out the writer in her. They make her see this world in a whole new light. Pink Musings is her first book and she desires to spend her entire life reading, writing and travelling.

The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas


Anne Salmond - 2003
    Cook and his crew soon formed friendships—and often more intimate relationships—with the islanders. The islanders, who initially were not certain if the Englishmen were even human, came to experiment with Western customs and in some cases joined the voyagers on their expeditions. But familiarity quickly bred contempt. Shipboard discipline was threatened by these new relationships, and the culture of the islands was also changed forever. Captain Cook, initially determined to act as an enlightened leader, saw his resolve falter during the third voyage. Amicable relations turned hostile, culminating in Cook’s violent death on the shores of Hawaii. In this masterful account of Cook’s voyages, Anne Salmond—a preeminent authority on the history of the south seas—reimagines two worlds that collided in the eighteenth century, and the enduring impact of that collision.

The Name at the End of the Ladder


Elena de Roo - 2014
    Soon she discovers she has no choice, unless she can win an ancient and mysterious board game. And every roll of the dice leads her further into danger. The Name at the End of the Ladder is a fantasy adventure for younger readers by award-winning New Zealand poet Elena de Roo. This junior fiction novel about the power of language and friendship is ideal for fans of Jumanji, Zathura and The Phantom Tollbooth. For more about the author and her books, please visit www.elenaderoo.com

99 Poems to Cure Whatever's Wrong with You or Create the Problems You Need


Sam Pink - 2019
    99 to be exact. bleeding out to the backdrop of this new cartoon. a woodchuck in a tiny witch hat laughs at you, as you lay down, hands over your chest and think, 'perfect.' and a red light atop a powerline blinks in the distance to remind that there is no end, only one long try, deflate at your own pace. don't fight the freefall. 99 poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. and yes, you need. im your fucking dad, honey. admit it, or we'll never get out of this alive.

Awake


Dorianne Laux - 1990
    Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

Iceland


Dominic Hoey - 2017
    We drifted through neighbourhoods in small packs, clinging to each other, all but alone. Our parents had given up. Packed their photos and furniture and moved to the forest to live simpler lives. But we stayed because there was nowhere else to go. We sold everything for rent — time, dignity, self-respect. Beneath the shiny new paint jobs and streets paved with debt lay our home."Stuck in a dead-end office job, Zlata hopes for a record deal so she can escape Auckland city. Then at party she meets Hamish, a graffiti artist and part-time drug dealer. Each has their own ideas about the other’s life, and surrounded by a makeshift family of friends and ex-lovers, their dreams of music, art and travel take shape.But as quickly as things come together, they can be torn apart — unravelling relationships and lives.

2000ft Above Worry Level


Eamonn Marra - 2020
    This episodic novel is piloted by a young, anhedonic, gentle, slightly disassociated man. He has no money. He has a supportive but disintegrating family. He is trying hard to be better. He is painting a never-ending fence.Eamonn Marra’s debut novel occupies the precarious spaces in which many twenty-somethings find themselves, forced as they are to live in the present moment as late capitalism presses in from all sides. Mortifying subjects – loserdom, depression, unemployment, cam sex – are surveyed with dignity and stoicism. Beneath Marra’s precise, unemotive language and his character’s steadfast grip on the surface of things, something is stirring.

Stonedogs


Craig Marriner - 2002
    A novel, which won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, to make you cringe and shudder, then wet yourself laughing. Its raw and scathing prose breaks new ground against the backdrop of a world-view as chilling as the nightly news. In between drug deals and binge-drinking, reckless driving and street fights, the delinquents of the Brotherhood wage the holiest of wars. Yes, they will derail the Juggernaut before it can suicide … or have a ball trying at least. But when one of them falls prey to Roto-Vegas gang members, the cultural terrorists mobilise in earnest. Revenge takes them on a road-trip - a coming of age from hell. It is a journey to the corners of a collective psyche peopled by nightmares as real as the headlines of today, a New Zealand the tourists and executives had better pray they never stumble upon. Alone and gut-shot, the Juggernaut closing in, the Brotherhood will rally for an audacious final stand, a last ditch fight for their minds and their lives … and perhaps for the future of us all.

The Quiet Spectacular


Laurence Fearnley - 2016
    wild' while showcasing women's strength and purpose, and the power of friendship and laughter.Loretta is a school librarian, who embarks on compiling The Dangerous Book for Menopausal Women while waiting to collect her son from after-school activities.Chance is a teenager, who discovers an unusual creative outlet to offset the strain of her controlling mother.Riva is dedicated to the wetlands sanctuary she created, who is seeking a way to fulfil her promise to her dying sister to do something 'absolutely spectacular'.Within a clearing in the woods by a lake stands a den, a secret sanctuary and eventual meeting place for all three women . . .

Meteoric Flowers


Elizabeth Willis - 2006
    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Of Gravity and Angels


Jane Hirshfield - 1988
    Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized.' - Theodore Weiss

The Real Thing


Brian Falkner - 2008
    'The Real Thing' is a rollicking adventure combining mystery ingredients, international conspiracies and a thrilling chase halfway around the world.

A Mouth in California


Graham Foust - 2009
    A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of thought: what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?