Headstrong Belinda becomes a successful filmmaker, but struggles to deal with her own family drama as her younger siblings are haunted by the past.A sweeping saga covering half a century, this is a powerful exploration of family ties and heartbreaks, and of learning to live with the past

    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.

    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.

    The fifteen stories featured, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, "At the Bay, " a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch "Mrs. Brill, " in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.

    The empty eye sockets were scary enough . . .Matt Logan isn't looking forward to spending the school holidays with his grandmother and her new husband. He has to fly to Rotorua, where he doesn't know anybody, and he's a bit wary of his new step-grandfather. All Matt knows is that he's Maori and a bus driver.Along with his worries, Matt packs his pride and joy - a homemade metal detector, because, you never know, he might find something interesting.What he finds is Juzza, who lives over the back fence and wants to join a local gang. When the boys unearth a handcuffed skeleton, a chain of events begins to coil around them. together they are thrown into a deadly search for treasure when the local gang boss decides to exploit their find for himself.

    He has a reputation as a former Otago rugby player and believes he would have been an All Black but for sporting injuries. He runs a successful real-estate agency in a provincial South Island town, of which he is the second-term mayor. Popular, happily married, well established, he cuts an impressive figure, especially in his own eyes.But will his pride and complacency come before a fall?

    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?

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Roads are closed and all rail is halted. For their own safety, city workers are told that they must go home early.Sita is a Tamil Sri Lankan refugee living in the Hutt Valley. She’s just had a call from her boss. If she doesn’t get to her cleaning job in the city she’ll lose her contract.

    But every dance begins with a backward step.Taking his cue from the tango, the acclaimed author of Mister Pip has written a thrilling and sensuous novel about how we fall in love.Ranging from rural New Zealand during the final days of World War I to Buenos Aires at mid-century to the present day, this masterful novel intertwines two love stories across three generations. The deep suspicions of an isolated community in the midst of war force Louise and Schmidt—two near-strangers—to hide in a cave overlooking the ocean. Desperate for solace, Schmidt teaches Louise the tango, and the iconic dance becomes their mutual obsession and the trigger for an affair that will span continents.Years later, Schmidt’s granddaughter, keeper of the family secrets, owns a restaurant in Wellington where a shy young student named Lionel washes the dishes. One day she snaps her fingers in his direction and says: “I need to dance.” Brilliantly evoking the seductive power of one of the world’s most famous dances, Lloyd Jones’s novel is a virtuoso performance.

    There's "Let's Go," the story of a young couple's apathetic wanderings on a trip to discover the real Prague; "You Can Hear the Boats Go By," the story of ex-lovers who cope with their chance meeting in a supermarket in the most childish way; and "Barking," the mad rant of a drama student pissed off by Clown class. Not Her Real Name presents an essential guide to postmodern romance, to the vagaries of city life, and to a chronically self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen.

    But he's focused on his duties as chief of the Maori in Whangara, New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary "whale rider." In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there's only Kahu. She should be next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to reestablish her people's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention—and lead her tribe to a bold new future.

    No one can hear her, just us boys. We're the dead Finnegans – Ma, Thomas, Ben and me.Ten-year-old John Finnegan can't leave his garden. Ever since they were murdered he, his brothers and his ma have been stuck there, caught between the worlds of the living and the dead. Unseen and unnoticed, he watches the events after his life unfold – including the actions of his murderer.James Stack is born dirt-poor on an Irish tenant farm and the great famine shadows his childhood. But his clever sister's lace making may save the family – until Aileen is sent to the other side of the world on a convict ship. To save her, James joins the redcoats and follows her across dangerous waters to a hopeful new land. But can he ever leave the death and hunger of his homeland behind?Based on the 1865 Otahuhu murders, Purgatory is a startling, gripping novel from an immensely talented new author.