NZ Fiction

"When I first met the Desolation Angel he was sprawled insolently across the top of my refrigerator. He wore a black three-button single-vent suit, and smoked a long cigar, the ashes of which he tapped into his left jacket pocket. He didn't acknowledge me until I was almost on him. Raising two red eyes in my direction, he said, "Don't sweat it. I'm here to help." Thirteen extraordinary stories by the author of the NZ Post-shortlisted novel Their Faces Were Shining

Against the historical background of the compelling and extraordinary events which surrounded the village of Parihaka in the 1870s and 1880s, Witi Ihimaera tells the fictional story of Erenora. Parihaka was a place synonymous with passive resistance, a place that Erenora called home, a place where Horitana came to find and marry her. It was also a place that the colonial settlers wanted to occupy, by fair means or foul. While most in Parihaka who passively resisted the encroachments were sent to gaol, Horitana was to meet a far wor... read more

In June 1941, Nazi troops march on Leningrad and surround it. Hitler's plan is to shell, bomb, and starve the city into submission. Most of the cultural elite are evacuated early in the siege, but Dmitri Shostakovich, the most famous composer in Russia, stays on to defend his city, digging ditches and fire-watching. At night he composes a new work. But after Shostakovich and his family are forced to evacuate, only Karl Eliasberg - a shy and difficult man, conductor of the second-rate Radio Orchestra - and an assortment of musicians... read more

'Dougie's story and mine is not told in the history of William Larnach. It is our private journey, and only we understand how it came about; only we know the fitness and the wonder of it.' William James Mudie Larnach's name resonates in New Zealand history - the politician and self-made man who built the famous 'castle' on Otago Peninsula. In 1891, after the death of his first two wives, he married the much younger Constance de Bathe Brandon. But the marriage that began with such happiness was to end in tragedy. The story of the ... read more

Auckland, June 1886. Ngati Wai chief Paratene Te Manu spends long sessions, over three long days, having his portrait painted by the Bohemian painter Gottfried Lindauer. Hearing of Lindauer's planned trip to England reminds him of his own journey there, twenty years earlier, with a party of northern rangatira. As he sits for Lindauer, Paratene retreats deeper and deeper into the past, from the triumphs in London and their meetings with royalty to the disintegration of the visit into poverty, mistrust, and humiliation. Based on a true story

One of the biggest novels ever published in New Zealand, and a bestseller throughout the world. Lloyd Jones' dazzling novel has been acclaimed throughout the world as a love song to the power of the imagination and of storytelling. It shows how books can change lives. Winner of Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best Book 2007 and Montana New Zealand Book Awards: Readers' Choice Award 2007 and Montana New Zealand Book Awards: Deutz Medal for Fiction 2007 and Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best Book South East Asia and South Pacifi... read more

Marion Flint lives alone on the wild west coast of New Zealand's North Island. One day she meets a small boy, Ika, on the empty, rugged beach, and an unlikely friendship begins between the Swedish doctor and the solemn child with webbed feet and a fear of being touched. As Marion's involvement with Ika deepens she is forced to revisit her own lonely childhood in Sweden, where neglect and a destructive home environment had deadly consequences. But Marion's most deeply buried hurt is that she had to lose the love of her life twice ov... read more

A moving and compelling story about society and our reactions to difference, evocative and beautifully written. A young man is found unconscious in a remote forest: He is very tall and completely covered with fur. Apart from his appearance, he seems like a normal human being, but when he wakes up in Dunedin Hospital he refuses to talk. The doctors, excited by the potential scientific discovery, want to run tests on him; the media, eager to solve and glamorise his mysterious past, want to get his story; and the public, naturally cur... read more

2009 Montana Book Awards Reader's Choice Winner FICTION Category Runner-up Frankie Parsons is twelve going on old man : an apparently sensible, talented Year 8 with a drumbeat of worrying questions steadily gaining volume in his head. 'Does the cat, and therefore the rest of the family, have worms?' 'Will bird flu strike and ruin life as we know it?' 'Is the kidney-shaped spot on his chest actually a galloping cancer?' Most of the significant people in Frankie... read more

Commemorating 75 years since the Empress of Crime's first book, the ninth volume in a set of omnibus editions presenting the complete run of 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries. CLUTCH OF CONSTABLES According to Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn, 'the Jampot' is an international crook who regards murder as 'tiresome and regrettable necessities'. But Alleyn's wife Troy has shared close quarters with the Jampot on a pleasure cruise along the peaceful rivers of 'Constable country' and knows something is badly wrong even before the two m... read more

This beautifully written novel by Laurence Fearnley is about finding love in the most unlikely of places. Set in the southern South Island, it describes the unusual friendship formed between 62-year-old photographer Edwin and 22-year-old Matilda, whom he meets when shooting photographs for her wedding. Brought together, Edwin and Matilda embark on a search for Edwin's mother, a woman he has long believed dead. The journey involves a series of telling, sometimes agonising, discoveries by Edwin - all the while with Matilda by his si... read more

The whale rider was Kahutia Te Rangi. Ancestor of the people of Te Tai Rawhiti, he travelled from Hawaiki, the place of the Ancients, to the East Coat of New Zealand. Then there was Kahu. The first great-grandchild of the whanau, she was loved by all her relatives except the one whose love she needed most — her great-grandfather.Moving effortlessly between mythology and realism, pathos and comedy, The Whale Rider will delight readers of all ages. Since its publication in 1987, The Whale Rider has been reprinted numerous times and ... read more

A stunning first novel by a new writer which will be enjoyed by followers of literary New Zealand fiction. This is a beautifully crafted novel using spare but evocative language. The story is European with a New Zealand connection. Linda Olsson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and completed the University of Auckland writing course under Witi Ihimaera and Stephanie Johnson in 2004. In 2003 she won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition.

The brilliant, haunting new novel from the author of the award-winning Mister Pip. A quiet, mysterious, unnamed woman has come from Africa on an impassioned quest. From the shoreline of Tunisia to the confusion of Berlin, she relies on strangers - some generous, some exploitive - to guide her passage, encountering love and betrayal in its many guises along the way. When the truth behind this spellbinding story is finally revealed, we are forced to revisit everything that has gone before.About the author:Lloyd Jones has published ... read more

Winner of the 1987 Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards. For narrative pace and power, vividness of character and majesty of setting, there has never been a New Zealand novel to match Maurice Shadbolt's Season of the Jew. Praised by critics and fellow writers in Britain and the United States for its monumental quality, it is the haunting story of a band of Maori tribesmen who, stripped of their land and sent into exile, came to identify with the Jews of ancient Israel and took the Old Testament as a plan of campaign against the B... read more

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 ... read more

John Tomb saw more of the world than most Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. From England to Australia to New Zealand, he led a life of adventure and romance. Two hundred years after his death, his tattooed head is discovered in an American museum. His spirit reawakened, John Tomb wryly observes those who would lay claim to his relic. Among others, there's the New Zealand delegation headed by the Prime Minister and including Tomb's Maori descendants, a leading historian, a prominent carver, the Diplomatic Protection Squa... read more

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award. Grimshaw has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. In Singularity, her powerful new collection, she has continued to develop the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added... read more

'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous, to the past. 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 poll... read more

Her came from behind and held her in his arms, told her to look again at earth and sky and water. Could she see how the world turned silver? People died, he told her, because they were afraid. They did not go out at night on dangerous water. They did not see the earth as it turned overnight to silver. From the late nineteenth century to the 1920's, from Kwangtung, China to Wellington and Dunedin and the Battlefields of the Western Front - a story of two families. Yung faces a new land that does not welcome the Chinese. Alone, K... read more