It is the early 1900s and brothers Yung and Shun, immigrants from China, eke out a living as greengrocers in Wellington. The pair must support their families back home, but know they must adapt if they are to survive and prosper in their adopted home. Meanwhile, Katherine McKechnie struggles to raise her rebellious son and her daughter following the death of her husband, Donald. A strident right-wing newspaperman, Donald terrorized his family, though was idolized by his son. One day, Katherine comes to Yung's shop and is touched by the Chinaman's unexpected generosity. Over time a clandestine relationship develops between the immigrant and the widow, a relationship Katherine's son Robbie cannot abide ...During the First World War, as young men are swept up on a tide of macho patriotism, Robbie takes his family's honour into his own hands. In doing so, he places his mother at the heart of a tragedy that will affect everyone and everything she holds dear. Powerful, moving and utterly unforgettable, "As the Earth Turns Silver" announces the arrival of a bold new voice in contemporary fiction.

    Attempting to tackle spiralling levels of crime and anti-social behaviour, the government has a new solution: to dye offenders purple.For once, even journalist Eve Baxter is shocked - she's spent years gathering the world's weird and wacky news, but has never seen anything as loopy as this. Learning of these shamed 'bruises on society', the nation is agog - and divided. There's anger and agreement, protest and debate. Oh, green and pleasant and now purple land...But still, there's a mystery to be solved: just how do the transformations to Purpleness occur? Transfixed by clues and conspiracies, Eve wonders if this could be her route into real news. And when her friends and family are affected by the Purple scheme, she begins to investigate...

    every morning, feverishly hot, her heart racing and mind whirring with every worst-case scenario imaginable. She's snappy, exhausted and has developed an alarming inability to remember simple nouns.When a friend has the audacity to suggest that forty-five-year-old landscape gardener Eliza Hamilton is hurtling toward menopause, she is naturally appalled. Menopause is something that happens to other women, older women.As Eliza tries to negotiate this new and confusing landscape, she also embarks on the biggest challenge of her career so far. But she soon discovers that juggling erratic mood swings with motherhood, demanding family members and domestic drudgery is far from the harmonious scenario she'd envisaged.If Eliza wants to embrace midlife without the crisis, she must first make some grown up choices and face some uncomfortable truths.Hilarious, gritty and brutally honest, Overgrown will have you laughing, crying and rooting for its quirky yet relatable characters. A much-needed novel every woman approaching midlife should read.

    The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko’s grandfather is busy protesting. People call him pōrangi, crazy, but when he dies, it’s up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whānau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.

    

    They are there for one last time, one last weekend, and one last party – but in the course of this weekend, their connections will be affirmed, and their frailties and secrets revealed – to the reader at least, if not to each other. The Hope Fault is a novel about extended family: about steps and exes and fairy godmothers; about parents and partners who are missing, and the people who replace them.

    "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence--both from outside the family, and also, devastatingly, from within. The lush landscape, rich with birdsong, wild fruit, and blazing stars, becomes a kind of refuge for Betty, but when her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, she has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters in her rural town of Breathed, Ohio. But despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father's brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write. She recounts the horrors of her family's past and present with pen and paper and buries them deep in the dirt--moments that has stung her so deeply, she could not tell them, until now. Inspired by the life of her own mother, Tiffany McDaniel sets out to free the past by telling this heartbreaking yet magical story--a remarkable novel that establishes her as one of the freshest and most important voices in American fiction.

    Set in a small town well below the Mason-Dixon line, River Jordan features an improbable friendship among three people who come to depend on one another like family. Jordan, a girl with an adventurous imagination, is hungry for warmth and companionship, since she gets no more than scolding from her strict mother and stepfather. When Jordan’s step-grandmother, Miss Amylee, needs a live-in nurse, the family’s housekeeper suggests her sister, Pansy—newly saved and released from prison—for the job. Pansy, Jordan, and Miss Amylee form an unlikely trio, and through small and large triumphs, each recovers a part of herself that was lost.

    One bottle a night was never quite enough. When she tried to cut down, she found it nearly impossible to have an alcohol-free day.Everyone around could see her drinking, but no one realised what a serious problem it was. She was high-functioning, fun-loving Lotta, not some messy, hopeless drunk. Only Lotta knew how sick and twisted her thinking about wine had become.Desperate and miserable, she was falling deeper and deeper into a boozy hellhole and running out of ideas about what she could do to stop it. What's a girl to do when her beloved wine becomes the enemy?Here's what Lotta did. She stopped drinking and secretly started a blog that charted the highs and lows of learning to live without alcohol. Mrs D was anonymous, honest and, as Lotta would discover, surrounded by people who would help her on her journey, and whom she could help in return.

    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.

    The narrative begins in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when twin boys, Shiva and Marion, are born to a nun (who dies) and a surgeon (who runs away). The babies, conjoined at the head, are successfully separated immediately after birth. The original conjoinment and separation of the boys becomes the operating theme of the novel and we are given situation after situation in which to consider the concepts of fusion and partition. Bookclub-in-a-Box looks at all that Verghese provides: history (Ethiopia and Eritrea), medicine (blood and liver disease), psychology (the search for identity), sociology (human relationships) and philosophy (of both science and religion). The narrative's real facts and descriptions are especially interesting for their thematic implications. Every Bookclub-in-a-Box printed discussion guide includes complete coverage of the themes and symbols, writing style, and interesting background information on the novel and the author.

    Set against the rugged beauty of the New Zealand back country, this is the tale of a young man's introduction to the art of deer culling and follows the exploits of a good keen man as he learns the skills necessary to become a good bushman.

    We both looked after Sophie and her baby. We had to. It’s not like Sophie was going to look after that baby herself. All she was interested in was weeping and wailing for her dead husband. She was so busy weeping and wailing for her dead husband that she rejected his baby who was right in front of her.When Olga’s friend Lara becomes a grandmother, Olga helps out whenever she can. After all, it’s a big imposition on Lara, looking after her bereaved daughter and the baby. And the new mother is not exactly considerate.But smoldering beneath Olga’s sensible support and loving generosity is a deep jealous need to be the centre of Lara’s attention and affection—a need that soon becomes a consuming, dangerous and ultimately tragic obsession.Gigi Fenster’s A Good Winter is an enthralling psychological thriller, a dark and complex portrait of a troubled mind.

    After a terrifying and uncertain journey, they landed in Auckland where they were able to seek asylum and - ultimately - create a new life.In this open and intimate account, Ghahraman talks about making a home in Aotearoa New Zealand, her work as a human rights lawyer, her United Nations missions, and how she became the first refugee to be elected to the New Zealand Parliament.Passionate and unflinching, Know Your Place is a story about breaking barriers, and the daily challenges of prejudice that shape the lives of women and minorities. At its heart, it's about overcoming fear, about family, and about finding a place to belong.

    From Venice to the South Island of New Zealand, from the assassination of a Gestapo commander in WWII to contemporary real estate shenanigans in Auckland, from political assassination in the darkest days of the Red Brigade to the vaulting cosmology of particle physics, The Antipodeans is a novel of epic proportions where families from the opposite ends of the earth discover an intergenerational legacy of love, blood and betrayal.