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.

    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.

    His story mirrors the alien experience everywhere.

    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.

    Later that day two ashen men stumbled from the entrance. Twenty-nine men remained unaccounted for. Initial probes revealed fatally high methane levels in the mine – conditions deemed unsurvivable for the trapped men. But it was only after a second blast five days later that all hope was extinguished.Tragedy at Pike River Mine is a dramatic, superbly researched and page-turning account of a disaster that should never have happened, of the dramatic political and legal fallout, and the effect on the small West Coast community. It reveals an appalling string of mistakes, from consent being given for the mine in the first place, to lack of proper monitoring equipment, pressure to ignore safety requirements, and effectively only a single exit. It puts a human face on the people who suffered, and provides penetrating insight on who's to blame.This is an essential read for everyone who cares about the future of New Zealand and our values as a nation. Rebecca Macfie's writing on Pike River has been hailed for its veracity, perspicacity and powerful human interest.

    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.

    After settling in Nova Scotia and building ships, they travel to Australia, then on to New Zealand, settling in Waipu, in Northland. McLeod is a tyrant, whose behavior is challenged by three generations of women who are subsequently banished from the community. The novel looks at issues of transgression and nonconformity within a moralistic culture, the need for mutual support and the difficulties facing early pioneers.

    A sleepy bohemian neighbourhood.An ancient legend from the ancient past.A brilliant but troubled young writer.A voluptuous healer.A shadowy cult and its sinister leader.A trail of riddles; a hidden artefact.An explicit sex scene, then a struggle for ultimate power.And a final, unspeakable secret.Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley is a dark and hilarious odyssey through Wellington’s underbelly.

    It is focused on the effort of Ripeka/Linda to find identity as well as love, as increasingly she commits herself to her Maori being, family and name.

    Above all, we are privy to the attendant avoidances, interruptions, and irrelevancies that are part of her attempt to complete a novel. It's a process that is painful, joyful, rueful, and profound. Through it all, Violet-Alice-Mavis chooses to be the entertainer, to make us laugh and cry, to be the ventriloquist who dares to enter the speech of others and expose them.

    A shrewd mission-educated Maori, Coates/Kooti, perceived as a thorn in the colonial flesh, escapes imprisonment and returns to Poverty Bay with a small band of followers. Kooti becomes the ruthless leader of a considerable native army, his Bible studies leading him to see himself and his people as latter-day Israelites. The story of what follows is told through the eyes of Captain Fairweather, a British army officer turned artist, an eminently humane man whose attempts to mend relations between natives and settlers meet with signal failure; while his wryly professional view of the beleaguered colony changes after a brutal attack on the half-Maori women he loves and her family. All main characters in this strange but true novel are historical and the tragic climax occurred in 1869 with the execution of a harmless and uncomprehending young Maori - an example.

    This colourful story focuses on the relationship between the girls as they grow into women and their attempt to escape their impoverished background.The story is alternatively narrated by the eloquent Fag and the sensitive Ginnie, as well sections told by an historian and industrial psychologist.

    They're inching towards that ultimate dream - buying their own land. Fenward's always been lucky with its sharemilkers: grateful, grafting folk who understand what's expected of them. Until now, when grief-stricken Ian Baxter and his precocious daughter, Gabrielle, arrive.Nickie Walker is enchanted by the glamour and worldliness of Gabrielle. Nickie's mother finds herself in the crossfire of a moral battle she dreads to confront. Each has a story to share.This is a coming-of-age story for two young girls who hold a mirror up to the place and people they love. It's a coming-of-age story, too, for a community forced to stare back at the image of a damaged soul.The question is: who will blink first?