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.

    It uncovers the slow maturing of love and trust between two loners in a hard world.

    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.

    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?

    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.

    A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger’s party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.

    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

    Meanwhile, her new flatmate is a joyless couch potato who hogs the TV and is vigilant in her quest to prevent excessive electricity consumption. Life would seem a bit grim if not for Jo's eccentric honorary Aunty Rose, who lives up the valley with her pet piglet, four dogs and two sheep.Rose was a wise and infinitely patient friend to both Jo and her bona fide nephew, Matthew, while they were growing up. And when Rose is hit by illness Jo moves in to look after her, while Matt helps out as much as his farming duties allow. But illness aside, it's not long before the mischievous Rose is playing cupid.

    At his peak he published the country’s finest literary journal on the smell of an oily rag from a falling-down house overflowing with books, long-haired children and chickens – an island of nonconformity in the heart of 1970s Auckland suburbia. Yet when Robin’s uncompromising integrity tipped into something much more self-destructive, a dark shadow fell over his career and personal life.In My Father’s Island, Adam Dudding writes frankly about the rise and fall of an unconventional cultural figure. But this is also a moving, funny and deeply personal story of a family, of a marriage, of feuds and secret loves – and of a son’s dawning understanding of his father.

    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.

    And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' Roza Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the Prime Minister's wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm, but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives. Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. Sharp, moving, brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at once a meditation on power and politics, and an intensely humane look at the choices people make as they struggle, against the odds, to maintain love and integrity in their lives.

    Her best friend Iraia wants the same, but as the descendent of a slave, such things are barely conceivable to him. One summer as they approach adulthood, they notice that their friendship has changed, and that, if they are ever to experience freedom, they will need to travel beyond the isolation and safety of their Queen Charlotte Sound home.One hundred years later, twins Lula and Bigsy's birth is literally one in a million, as their mother Tui likes to tell people. But when Tui dies they learn there is much she kept secret, especially about their heritage. They too will need to travel beyond the world they have known, to an island they barely knew existed, at the eastern edge of New Zealand's Pacific realm.Neither Mere and Iraia, nor Lula and Bigsy are aware that someone else is part of their journeys. He does not watch over them so much as watch through them, feeling their loss and confusion as if it were his own.

    In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds left by its absence, Once Were Warriors is a masterpiece of unblinking realism, irresistible energy, and great sorrow.

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

    His attempts to understand the turn his life has taken lead him back to the past, to dismaying events on an Amsterdam houseboat in the seventies; returning to New Zealand and meeting Moira, an amateur painter who carried secrets of her own; and to a trip to Europe years later with his family. An unexpected revelation forces Peter to navigate anew his roles as a husband, father, and son. Set in Wellington after the fall of the Twin Towers, and traversing London, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, The New Ships is a mesmerizing book of blood-ties that stretch across borders. A novel of acute moral choices, it is a rich and compelling meditation on what it means to act, or to fail to act.