We've ranked the best new zealand books using expert recommendations, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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1
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
5.0
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.
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2
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
5.0
It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner.
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3
The Whale Rider
Witi Ihimaera
4.8
Eight-year-old Kahu, a member of the Maori tribe of Whangara, New Zealand, fights to prove her love, her leadership, and her destiny. Her people claim descent from Kahutia Te Rangi, the legendary ‘whale rider.’ In every generation since Kahutia, a male heir has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir, and the aging chief is desperate to find a successor. Kahu is his only great-grandchild—and Maori tradition has no use for a girl. But when hundreds of whales beach themselves and threaten the future of the Maori tribe, Kahu will do anything to save them—even the impossible.
In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.
Imprisoned for over two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.
One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.
A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions.
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6
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
4.6
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
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7
The Garden Party and Other Stories
Katherine Mansfield, Lorna Sage
4.5
Written during the final stages of her illness, "The Garden Party and Other Stories" is full of a sense of urgency and was Katherine Mansfield's last collection to be published during her lifetime. 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.
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8
Once Were Warriors
Alan Duff
4.5
Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. 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.
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9
Island of the Lost: An Extraordinary Story of Survival at the Edge of the World
Joan Druett
4.5
“Riveting.” —The New York Times Book Review
Hundreds of miles from civilization, two ships wreck on opposite ends of the same deserted island in this true story of human nature at its best—and at its worst.
It is 1864, and Captain Thomas Musgrave’s schooner, the Grafton, has just wrecked on Auckland Island, a forbidding piece of land 285 miles south of New Zealand. Battered by year-round freezing rain and constant winds, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.
Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, another ship runs aground during a storm. Separated by only twenty miles and the island’s treacherous, impassable cliffs, the crews of the Grafton and the Invercauld face the same fate. And yet where the Invercauld’s crew turns inward on itself, fighting, starving, and even turning to cannibalism, Musgrave’s crew bands together to build a cabin and a forge—and eventually, to find a way to escape.
Using the survivors’ journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings to life this extraordinary untold story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.
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10
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story
Christina Thompson
4.5
In this involving, compassionate memoir, Christina Thompson tells the story of her romance and eventual marriage to a Maori man, interspersing it with a narrative history of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand.
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11
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy
Lynley Dodd
4.4
Hairy Maclary goes off for a walk in town, followed by a few friends. All is uneventful until they meet Scarface Claw, the toughest tom in town, and run for home. The story is told by a brilliant, cumulative rhyming text and terrific pictures.
Recommended by Catherine Rayner.
Catherine Rayner
Hairy Maclary, a scruffy little dog, trots about town. On the way he gathers up lots of dog friends. It’s a rhyming text with repetition that builds. [source]
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12
The Colour
Rose Tremain
4.4
Newlyweds Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from England to New Zealand, along with Joseph's mother Lilian, in search of new beginnings and prosperity, but the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in a creek bed, he hides the discovery from both his wife and mother and becomes obsessed with the riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new goldfields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of the "colour," rush to their destinies and doom.
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13
In the Land of the Long White Cloud (In the Land of the Long White Cloud saga Book 1)
Sarah Lark
4.4
Hardworking London governess Helen Davenport longs for a family of her own but knows the prospect of finding a suitable husband grows dimmer each year. Then she spots an advertisement seeking wives for the churchgoing bachelors of colonial New Zealand and begins an affectionate correspondence with a gentleman farmer. Meanwhile, not far away in Wales, society life bores Gwyneira Silkham, beautiful, daring daughter of a wealthy sheep breeder. She finds an unexpected escape when her father loses a blackjack hand to a mysterious New Zealand baron ? and Gwyn's hand in marriage goes to the baron's son. The women cross paths on the ship to Christchurch ? Helen traveling steerage, Gwyn first class ? and form an unlikely friendship, one they?ll rely on when the husbands awaiting them turn out very different than they?d imagined. This nineteenth-century saga of two unforgettable young women ? navigating a new world and finding friendship, romance, and adventure at every turn ? is as lush and sweeping as the hills of New Zealand themselves.
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14
Faces in the Water
Janet Frame
4.4
Narrated entirely from the viewpoint of a young insane woman, this novel provides a moving description of the horrific conditions in two New Zealand mental institutions.
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15
Pounamu Pounamu
Witi Ihimaera
4.4
Pounamu Pounamu is classic Ihimaera. First published om 1972, it was immediately endorsed by Maori and Pakeha alike for its original stories that showed how important Maori identity is for all New Zealanders. As Katherine Mansfield did in her first collection In a German Pension (1911), and Janet Frame in The Lagoon (1951), Witi Ihimaera explores in Pounamu Pounamu what it is like to be a New Zealander - but from a Maori perspective. The seeds of Ihimaera's later works are first introduced in this ground-breaking collection- The Whale Rider in his story 'The Whale', The Rope of Man in 'Tangi', and the character of Simeon form Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies in 'One Summer Morning'; and the themes of aroha (love), whanaungatanga (kinship) and manaakitanga (supporting each other), which are so intergral to Ihimaera's work.
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16
Owls Do Cry
Janet Frame
4.4
Set in provincial, pre-1940s New Zealand, Owls Do Cry explores the Withers family, in particular Daphne Withers. 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.
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17
An Angel at my Table (Autobiography, #1-3)
Janet Frame
4.4
This autobiography traces Janet Frame's childhood in a poor but intellectually intense family, life as a student, years of incarceration in mental hospitals and eventual entry into the saving world of writers.
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18
Potiki
Patricia Grace
4.3
A Maori community on the coast of New Zealand is threatened by a land developer who wants to purchase the community property, move the community meeting hall, and construct many new buildings, including an "underwater zoo." The story is told in several chapters that switch narrators. Sometimes, it is Hemi, a man who was laid off from his job and realizes that this situation affords him the opportunity to reconnect with the land, his culture and his family. Other times, Toko is the narrator. Toko is Hemi's adopted son and is physically handicapped. However, he also has a sixth sense and can see events before they occur. Mostly, though, the story is told by Roimata, Hemi's wife and Toko's adoptive mother. She relates the growing concern the Maori have about developers coming into their land, and their quiet, concerted efforts to rebel. She details their successes and many painful failures in a sparse, simple prose. The book does not really have a true resolution; instead, Patricia Grace outlines the cultural differences that exist in New Zealand, and the uses and abuses of power, and how it can affect a people.
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19
Just This Once (Escape to New Zealand, #1)
Rosalind Jame
4.3
Everyone needs to be rescued sometimes.
Everyone but Hannah Montgomery, that is. She just needs a vacation. Three weeks in New Zealand to sort out her life, figure out what she wants, seems just right. Oh, and to relax. She should definitely put that on the agenda. She certainly isn’t looking for a sexy fling with a professional rugby player, no matter how attractive he is. Hannah doesn’t do casual. But maybe just this once ...
As much as he’s shared with Hannah, Drew Callahan has kept one very big secret. And learning the truth, now that she’s back home again, has made Hannah warier than ever. Drew knows that she’s right for him. But how can he convince her to let down her guard enough to explore what they could have together?
Note: This romance, like New Zealand, contains some steam. If that isn't your cuppa, you may want to visit another country ... er, book.
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20
In My Father's Den
Gee Maurice
4.3
When Celia Inverarity, aged seventeen, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - which proves as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed. In My Father's Den is Maurice Gee's third novel and was first published in 1972. It is now an international feature film of the same name. In My Father's Den is directed by Brad McGann and Produced by Trevor Haysom and Dixie Linder, and stars Matthew Macfayden, Miranda Otto and Emily Barclay.
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21
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
4.3
With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University.
Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, 'In a German Pension', appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work.
This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923. With an introduction and head-notes, this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years. Admired by Virginia Woolf in her lifetime and by many writers since her death, Katherine Mansfield is one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century.
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22
The Changeover
Margaret Mahy
4.3
Carnegie medal-winning supernatural romance from Margaret Mahy.
The face in the mirror. From the moment she saw it, Laura Chant knew that something dreadful was going to happen. It wasn’t the first time she’d been forewarned. But never before had anything so terrible happened. The horrifyingly evil Carmody Braque touched and branded her little brother – and now Jacko was very ill, getting steadily worse. There was only one way to save him. Laura had to change over: had to release her supernatural powers. And that meant joining forces with the extraordinary and enigmatic Sorenson Carlisle…
Nine of us came here. We look like you. We talk like you. We live among you. But we are not you. We can do things you dream of doing. We have powers you dream of having. We are stronger and faster than anything you have ever seen. We are the superheroes you worship in movies and comic books--but we are real.
Our plan was to grow, and train, and become strong, and become one, and fight them. But they found us and started hunting us first. Now all of us are running. Spending our lives in shadows, in places where no one would look, blending in. We have lived among you without you knowing.
But they know.
They caught Number One in Malaysia. Number Two in England. And Number Three in Kenya. They killed them all.
I am Number Four.
I am next.
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24
Under the Mountain
Maurice Gee
4.3
While vacationing with relatives in Auckland, twins Theo and Rachel discover that they are endowed with special powers to oppose mysterious giant creatures that are determined to destroy the world.
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25
The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1)
Graeme Simsion
4.3
An international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to find out if he is capable of true love.
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful” husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.
Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.
The Rosie Project is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.
Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right.) It’s an extraordinarily clever, funny, and moving book about being comfortable with who you are and what you’re good at. I’m sending copies to several friends and hope to re-read it later this year. This is one of the most profound novels I’ve read in a long time. [source]
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26
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
Andrea Wulf
4.3
The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.
Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden.
With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.
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27
The Vintner's Luck (Vintner's Luck, #1)
Elizabeth Knox
4.2
One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau sets out to drown his love sorrows in his family's vineyard when he stumbles on an angel. Once he gets over his shock, Sobran decides that Xas, the male angel, is his guardian sent to counsel him on everything from marriage to wine production. But Xas turns out to be a far more mysterious character. Compelling and erotic, The Vintner's Luck explores a decidedly unorthodox love story as Sobran eventually comes to love and be loved by both Xas and the young Countess de Valday, his friend and employer at the neighboring chateau.
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28
When We Believed in Mermaids
Barbara O'Neal
4.2
From the author of The Art of Inheriting Secrets comes an emotional new tale of two sisters, an ocean of lies, and a search for the truth.
Her sister has been dead for fifteen years when she sees her on the TV news…
Josie Bianci was killed years ago on a train during a terrorist attack. Gone forever. It’s what her sister, Kit, an ER doctor in Santa Cruz, has always believed. Yet all it takes is a few heart-wrenching seconds to upend Kit’s world. Live coverage of a club fire in Auckland has captured the image of a woman stumbling through the smoke and debris. Her resemblance to Josie is unbelievable. And unmistakable. With it comes a flood of emotions—grief, loss, and anger—that Kit finally has a chance to put to rest: by finding the sister who’s been living a lie.
After arriving in New Zealand, Kit begins her journey with the memories of the past: of days spent on the beach with Josie. Of a lost teenage boy who’d become part of their family. And of a trauma that has haunted Kit and Josie their entire lives.
Now, if two sisters are to reunite, it can only be by unearthing long-buried secrets and facing a devastating truth that has kept them apart far too long. To regain their relationship, they may have to lose everything.
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29
The Denniston Rose (The Denniston Rose #1)
Jenny Pattrick
4.2
The bleak coal-mining settlement of Denniston, isolated high on a plateau above New Zealand's West Coast, is a place that makes or breaks those who live there. At the time of this novel - the 1880s - the only way to reach the makeshift collection of huts, tents and saloons is to climb aboard an empty coal-wagon to be hauled 2000 feet up the terrifyingly steep Incline - the cable-haulage system that brings the coal down to the railway line. All sorts arrive here to work the mines and bring out the coal: ex-goldminers down on their luck; others running from the law, or from a woman, or worse. They work alongside recruited English miners, solid and skilled, who scorn these disorganised misfits and want them off the Hill.
Into this chaotic community come five-year-old Rose and her mother, riding up the Incline, at night, during a storm. No one knows what has driven them there, but most agree the mother must be desperate to choose Denniston; worse, to choose that drunkard Jimmy Cork as bedfellow. The mother has her reasons and her plans, which she tells no one. The indomitable Rose is left to fend for herself, struggling to secure a place in this tough and often aggressive community. The Denniston Rose is about isolation and survival. It is the story of a spirited child, who, in appalling conditions, remains a survivor.
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30
Mawson's Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written
Lennard Bickel
4.2
Mawson's Will is the dramatic story of what Sir Edmund Hillary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history." For weeks in Antarctica, Douglas Mawson faced some of the most daunting conditions ever known to man: blistering wind, snow, and cold; loss of his companion, his dogs and supplies, the skin on his hands and the soles of his feet; thirst, starvation, disease, snowblindness - and he survived. Sir Douglas Mawson is remembered as the young Australian who would not go to the South Pole with Robert Scott in 1911, choosing instead to lead his own expedition on the less glamorous mission of charting nearly 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline and claiming its resources for the British Crown. His party of three set out through the mountains across glaciers in 60-mile-per-hour winds. Six weeks and 320 miles out, one man fell into a crevasse, along with the tent, most of the equipment, all of the dogs' food, and all except a week's supply of the men's provisions. Mawson's Will is the unforgettable story of one man's ingenious practicality and unbreakable spirit and how he continued his meticulous scientific observations even in the face of death. When the expedition was over, Mawson had added more territory to the Antarctic map than anyone else of his time. Thanks to Bickel's moving account, Mawson can be remembered for the vision and dedication that make him one of the world's great explorers.
I love stories of survival and I love strong men. This is one man's story of surviving in Antartica when he lost everyone and everything and still managed to make it back to his ship under the worst possible conditions and elements. [source]
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31
The Halfmen of O
Maurice Gee
4.2
When Nick Quinn goes to spend a couple of weeks on his uncle's farm at Lodestone Creek, he expects it to be like every other summer holiday. His dopey cousin Susan is more remote than ever, but swimming and exploring will make up for the lack of companionship.
But Susan is spirited off down a disused mineshaft into the world of O, and is taken prisoner by Odo Cling and the Deathguard. Nick follows to rescue her and the Woodlanders of O come to his aid. They know that Susan is the only one who can save their world, and perhaps her own.
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32
Genesis
Bernard Beckett
4.2
Anax thinks she knows history. Her grueling all-day Examination has just begun, and if she passes, she’ll be admitted into the Academy—the elite governing institution of her utopian society. But Anax is about to discover that for all her learning, the history she’s been taught isn’t the whole story. And the Academy isn’t what she believes it to be. In this brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity, Anax’s examination leads us into a future where we are confronted with unresolved questions raised by science and philosophy. Centuries old, these questions have gained new urgency in the face of rapidly developing technology. What is consciousness? What makes us human? If artificial intelligence were developed to a high enough capability, what special status could humanity still claim? Outstanding and original, Beckett’s dramatic narrative comes to a shocking conclusion.
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33
In Too Deep (Stewart Island, #1)
Tracey Alvarez and Sunset Rose Book
4.2
She's haunted by the ghosts of her past. He broke her heart to save his own.
As an elite police diver tormented by her father's fatal drowning accident, Piper Harland is forced back to the one place she'd sworn never to return. Her tiny hometown on New Zealand’s isolated Stewart Island hasn’t much changed in the nine years she’s been gone. But she soon comes face to face with everything she ran from — grief, regret, and the scalding pain of a love lost.
The one place Ryan "West" Westlake belongs is a hundred feet below Stewart Island’s dangerous waters with one breath of air and only a line to guide him to the surface. Down deep he can forget his mentor’s death. Down deep he can forget the one woman who seared his heart when she left. Only now she’s back, and as it turns out, he hasn’t forgotten a thing.
Desire and tempers flare when West and Piper cross paths again. Can they face their past and be together? Two hearts. A second chance. Everything on the line...
IN TOO DEEP is the first story in Tracey Alvarez's best-selling Stewart Island books set against the stunning backdrop of Aotearoa, New Zealand. If you like heartwarming, sexy and sweet small town romances with a touch of comedy, you'll love sharing the journey with these authentic men and women struggling to find their special someone.
Intended for mature 18+ aged readers who enjoy their feel good romance on the steamier side.
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34
Green Dolphin Street
Elizabeth Goudge
4.2
A haunting love story set in the Channel Islands and New Zealand in the 19th century.
William Ozanne, whose hypnotic, masculine presence made two sisters adore him with all their heart... The two beautiful daughters of a wealthy merchant of the Channel Islands fall in love with the same man, are very diferent. Marianne, the eldest sister is brilliant, passionate, and moody, by whom William was both fascinated and repelled... And Marguerite, the younger sister is pretty, dreamy and quietly, whom William adored.
The sisters had both loved him for years. He has gone abroad to seek his fortune to New Zealand. Now they were waiting for him to return from his journeys and claim his bride. But drunkenly he addresses his proposal to the wrong sister.
Though the book is fiction, and the characters not portraits, it is based on fact. A stunning tale of loss and self-sacrifice, it is truly one of the most memorable love stories of the last century.
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35
Died in the Wool (Roderick Alleyn, #13)
Ngaio Marsh
4.2
One summer evening in 1942, Flossie Rubrick, goes to her husband's wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech - and disappears. Three weeks later she turns up at an auction, packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead
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36
I Am Not Esther (I Am Not Esther, #1)
Fleur Beale
4.2
A young girl is left by her mother with relatives she's never met who are members of a strict religious cult. Her name is changed to the biblical Esther, and she is forced to follow the severe set of social codes of the order. Soon, Esther begins to lose her own identity.
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37
To the Is-land: An Autobiography (Autobiography, #1)
Janet Frame
4.2
In this first volume of her autobiography, New Zealand novelist Janet Frame tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.
Despite material privations and family conflicts, the world of the imagination was accorded a supreme place in the Frame household, and it was at this time that Janet Frame acquired her lifelong love for Romantic poetry and her tactile sense of the power of words.
Amongst evocations of New Zealand landscape and the recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck Janet Frame under in the years before she found herself as a writer.
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38
The Thorn Birds
Colleen McCulloug
4.2
Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0380018179 (ISBN13: 9780380018178) The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister; and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway around the world from her roots.
The central figures in this enthralling story are the indomitable Meggie, the only Cleary daughter, and the one man she truly loves, the stunningly handsome and ambitious priest Ralph de Bricassart. Ralph's course moves him a long way indeed, from a remote Outback parish to the halls of the Vatican; and Meggie's except for a brief and miserable marriage elsewhere, is fixed to the Drogheda that is part of her bones - but distance does not dim their feelings though it shapes their lives.
Wonderful characters people this book; strong and gentle, Paddy, hiding a private memory; dutiful Fiona, holding back love because it once betrayed her, violent, tormented Frank, and the other hardworking Cleary sons who give the boundless lands of Drogheda the energy and devotion most men save for women; Meggie; Ralph; and Meggie's children, Justine and Dane. And the land itself; stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.
(First Edition Jacket)
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39
The Piano
Jane Campion
4.2
In the award-winning film The Piano, writer/director Jane Campion created a story so original and powerful it fascinated millions of moviegoers. This novel stands independent of the film, exploring the mysteries of Ada's muteness, the secret of her daughter's conception, the reason for her strange marriage and the past lives of Baines and Stewart.
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40
Rock Hard (Rock Kiss, #2)
Nalini Sing
4.2
In New York Times Bestselling author Nalini Singh’s newest contemporary romance, passion ignites between a gorgeous, sinfully sexy man who built himself up from nothing and a shy woman who has a terrible secret in her past…
Wealthy businessman Gabriel Bishop rules the boardroom with the same determination and ruthlessness that made him a rock star on the rugby field. He knows what he wants, and he’ll go after it no-holds-barred.
And what he wants is Charlotte Baird.
Charlotte knows she’s a mouse. Emotionally scarred and painfully shy, she just wants to do her job and remain as invisible as possible. But the new CEO—a brilliant, broad-shouldered T-Rex of a man who growls and storms through the office, leaving carnage in his wake—clearly has other plans. Plans that may be equal parts business and bedroom.
If Charlotte intends to survive this battle of wits and hearts, the mouse will have to learn to wrangle the T-Rex. Game on.
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41
Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying
Light Watkins
4.2
From one of America’s top meditation teachers comes a revolutionarily simple approach to everyday practice—especially if you don’t think you have the time or the patience.
Imagine you’re sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed, ready to tap into unlimited joy. There’s just one problem: You can’t get comfortable (let alone still), and your head is full of way too many thoughts.
The problem is not with meditation, or you, though—the issue may be with your approach.
When properly understood and practiced, meditation should feel easy, calming, and comfortable. In Bliss More, maverick instructor Light Watkins provides the tools for making it E.A.S.Y. (Embrace, Accept, Surrender, Yield), dispels the biggest myths and misunderstandings, and shares real-world tips and straight talk for hacking into this ancient practice. The result: a happier and healthier you, inside and out. Watkins also shares candid testimonials from people whose lives have been enriched through his method, and extensive resources for transforming a daily chore into an enjoyable activity. Even the biggest skeptic will look forward to sitting for meditation every day.
Whether you’re a novice or experienced practitioner, Bliss More will shed light on the path to a clearer mind, better sleep, and more bliss in everyday life.
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42
Wild Pork and Watercress
Barry Crump
4.2
A tale of raw adventure as Uncle Hec and Ricky use all their skills to survive in the hard world of precipitous hills and impassable forest. It uncovers the slow maturing of love and trust between two loners in a hard world.
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43
The 10 PM Question
Kate De Goldi
4.2
Twelve-year-old Frankie Parsons is a talented kid with a quirky family, a best friend named Gigs, and a voice of anxiety constantly nibbling in his head: Could that kidney-shaped spot on his chest be a galloping cancer? Are the smoke alarm batteries flat? Has his cat, The Fat Controller, given them all worms? Only Ma, who never leaves home, takes Frankie’s worries seriously. But then, it is Ma who is the cause of the most troubling question of all, the one Frankie can never bring himself to ask. When a new girl arrives at school — a daring free spirit with unavoidable questions of her own — Frankie’s carefully guarded world begins to unravel, leading him to a painful confrontation with the ultimate 10 p.m. question. Deftly told with humor, poignancy, and an endearing cast of characters, The 10 P.M. Question will touch everyone who has ever felt set apart.
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44
The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero
Timothy Egan
4.2
National Book Award winner Timothy Egan delivers a story of one of the most famous Irish Americans of all time. A dashing young orator during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony for life. But two years later he was “back from the dead” and in New York, instantly the most famous Irishman in America. Meagher’s rebirth included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. Afterward, he tried to build a new Ireland in the wild west of Montana—a quixotic adventure that ended in the great mystery of his disappearance, which Egan resolves convincingly at last.
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45
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
4.2
A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter... From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life... And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.
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Recommended by Robert Eaglestone and The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
Robert Eaglestone
In this novel, you find stories that interlock like Russian dolls…an obvious example of a writer learning clever postmodern tricks, but domesticating them. [source]
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
This is the perfect book if you want to read about human extinction but you still need to be ‘seduced’ into it. [source]
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46
A Madness of Sunshine
Nalini Sing
4.1
10 hours, 59 minutes
New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh welcomes you to a remote town on the edge of the world where even the blinding brightness of the sun can’t mask the darkness that lies deep within a killer…
On the rugged West Coast of New Zealand, Golden Cove is more than just a town where people live. The adults are more than neighbors; the children, more than schoolmates. That is until one fateful summer—and several vanished bodies—shatters the trust holding Golden Cove together. All that’s left are whispers behind closed doors, broken friendships, and a silent agreement not to look back. But they can’t run from the past forever.
Eight years later, a beautiful young woman disappears without a trace, and the residents of Golden Cove wonder if their home shelters something far more dangerous than an unforgiving landscape.
It’s not long before the dark past collides with the haunting present and deadly secrets come to light.
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47
Where the Rekohu Bone Sings
Tina Makereti
4.1
From the Chatham Islands/Rekohu to London, the 21st century to 1835, this novel confronts the complexity of being Moriori, Maori and Pakeha.
In the 1880s, Mere yearns for independence. 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.
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48
An Olive Grove at the Edge of the World: How two American city boys built a new life in rural New Zealand
Jared Gulian
4.1
Discover the hilarious and endearing tale of how two American city boys learn to become olive farmers in rural New Zealand.
For Jared Gulian, leaving the United States and coming to tiny Wellington, New Zealand, was a big enough switch from the bright lights of big cities. So when his partner CJ decided they just had to buy a rundown olive grove in the Wairarapa valley, it was almost too much to cope with.
First they'd have to drive over the dangerous Rimutaka range road to get there, and Jared was terrified of heights. Then they'd have to figure out what on earth you do with 500 olive trees that hadn't been pruned for years, a geriatric rooster, warring hens, an obese kunekune pig, cast sheep, marauding cattle, and understanding your neighbors when they said "yiece" but meant "yes".
In this charming and warm-hearted memoir, Jared Gulian describes the first four years of their new life in the country, its disasters and small triumphs, its surprises and pleasures. But most of all he describes the warmth of the local community that welcomed him, saved him from certain peril, taught him how to cook, how to care for animals, and how to understand and love the land.
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49
Cousins
Patricia Grace
4.1
Mata, Makareta, and Missy, three Maori cousins, once shared a magical childhood moment. They have since followed separate and very different paths, yet their struggles offer insightful glimpses into the lives of contemporary New Zealand women. Patricia Grace's keen eye records the psychological, cultural, and political circumstances that color and circumscribe their worlds in this engaging, compassionate story.
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50
Tamar (Tamar Deane Trilogy #1)
Deborah Challinor
4.1
When Tamar Deane is orphaned at seventeen in a small Cornish village, she seizes the chance for a new life and emigrates to New Zealand. In March 1879, alone and frightened on the Plymouth quay, she is befriened by an extraordinary woman. Myrna McTaggert is traveling to Auckland with plans to establish the finest brothel in the southern hemisphere and her unconventional friendship proves invaluable when Tamar makes disastrous choices in the new colony. Tragedy and scandal befall, her, but unexpected good fortune brings vast changes to Tamar's life. As the century draws to a close, uncertainty looms when a distant was lures her loved ones to South Africa.
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51
Cleo: How an Uppity Cat Helped Heal a Family
Helen Brow
4.1
Helen Brown wasn't a cat person, but her nine-year-old son Sam was. So when Sam heard a woman telling his mum that her cat had just had kittens, Sam pleaded to go and see them. Helen's heart melted as Sam held one of the kittens in his hands with a look of total adoration. In a trice the deal was done - the kitten would be delivered when she was big enough to leave her mother. A week later, Sam was dead. Not long after, a little black kitten was delivered to the grieving family. Totally traumatised by Sam's death, Helen had forgotten all about the new arrival. After all, that was back in another universe when Sam was alive. Helen was ready to send the kitten back, but Sam's younger brother wanted to keep her, identifying with the tiny black kitten who'd also lost her brothers. When Rob stroked her fur, it was the first time Helen had seen him smile since Sam's death. There was no choice: the kitten - dubbed Cleo - had to stay. Kitten or not, there seemed no hope of becoming a normal family. But Cleo's zest for life slowly taught the traumatised family to laugh. She went on to become the uppity high priestess of Helen's household, vetoing her new men, terrifying visiting dogs and building a special bond with Rob, his sister Lydia, Helen - and later a baby daughter.
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52
Lonely Planet New Zealand
Lonely Planet, Charles Rawlings-Way, et al.
4.1
Lonely Planet: The world’s number one travel guide publisher*
Lonely Planet’s New Zealandis your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Glide through turquoise waters past pods of orcas in Bay of Islands; try black-water rafting in astonishing Waitomo Caves; watch the ground breathe steam in volcanic Rotorua; and hit the slopes in Queenstown and Wanaka – all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of New Zealand and begin your journey now!
Inside Lonely Planet’s New Zealand:
Colour maps and images throughout
Highlightsand itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests
Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots
Essential infoat your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices
Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sightseeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss
Cultural insights provide a richer, more rewarding travel experience - covering history, people, music, landscapes, wildlife, cuisine, politics
Covers Auckland, Bay of Islands Northland, Waikato the Coromandel Peninsula, Taupo the Central Plateau, Rotorua the Bay of Plenty, the East Coast, Wellington Around, Marlborough Nelson, the West Coast, Christchurch Canterbury, Dunedin Otago, Queenstown Wanaka, Fiordland Southland The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet’s New Zealandis our most comprehensive guide to the country, and is designed to immerse you in the culture and help you discover the best sights and get off the beaten track.
Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet’s New Zealand’s North IslandorNew Zealand’s South Island for a comprehensive look at all the country has to offer.
About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world’s number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You’ll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, nine international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.
‘Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.’ – New York Times
‘Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.’ – Fairfax Media (Australia)
*Source: Nielsen BookScan: Australia, UK, USA, 5/2016-4/2017
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53
Song of the Spirits (In the Land of the Long White Cloud Saga #2)
Sarah Lark, D.W. Lovett
4.1
Song of the Spirits continues the soaring saga begun with In the Land of the Long White Cloud, as the founding families of colonial New Zealand experience trials and triumphs of friendship, romance, and unforgettable adventure.
Elaine O’Keefe is the radiant grand-daughter of Gwyneira McKenzie, who made her way to New Zealand to take a wealthy sheep baron’s hand in marriage in In the Land of the Long White Cloud. Elaine inherited not only her grandmother’s red hair but also her feisty spirit, big heart, and love of the land. When William Martyn, a handsome young Irishman of questionable integrity, walks into her life, she succumbs rapidly to his charms. Only to have her heart broken when her sensual half-Maori cousin Kura Warden arrives for a visit and draws William away.
Though both young women must endure hardships and disappointments as they learn to live with the choices they make, each of them also discovers an inner resilience—and eventually finds love and happiness in new, unexpected places. Tested by the harsh realities of colonial life, both girls mature into spirited young women with a greater understanding of the challenges—and joys—of love, friendship, and family.
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54
I Am Rebecca (I Am Not Esther, #2)
Fleur Beal
4.1
When she turns 14, Rebecca will find out who she is to marry. All the girls in her strict religious sect must be married just after their 16th birthdays.
Her twin sister Rachel desperately wants to marry the boy she’s given her heart to. All Rebecca wants is to have a husband who is kind. But both girls know the choice is not theirs to make.
But what will the future hold for Rebecca? Is there a dark side to the rules that have kept her safe? Can the way ahead be so simple when the community is driven by secrets and hidden desires?
This powerful psychological thriller, set in a cult community, is a sequel to the much-loved bestseller I am not Esther. Once again, award-winning Fleur Beale keeps readers on the edge of their seats with her gripping, tautly written new novel I am Rebecca.
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55
Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas
Lynne Cox, Brian Floca
4.1
World-renowned swimmer and bestselling author Lynne Cox and Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator Brian Floca team up to bring us this inspiring story of an elephant seal who knew exactly where she belonged.
Here is the incredible story of Elizabeth, a real-life elephant seal who made her home in the Avon River in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. When Elizabeth decides to stretch out across a two-lane road, the citizens worry she might get hurt or cause traffic accidents, so a group of volunteers tows her out to sea. But Elizabeth swims all the way back to Christchurch. The volunteers catch her again and again—each time towing her farther, even hundreds of miles away—but, still, Elizabeth finds her way back home.
Includes back matter with information about elephant seals.
From the Hardcover edition.
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56
Hera Lindsay Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird
4.1
this impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl………with many beneficial thoughts and feelings………
with themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is………juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes
Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog………or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert………
this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness………
heartbreaking and charged with trees………without once sacrificing the forest………
Whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parent’s sleepout………
………or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram………
this is the book for you………………………
heroically and compulsively stupid………………………………………
………………………………………whipping you once again into medieval sunlight.
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57
This Mortal Boy
Fiona Kidman
4.1
An utterly compelling recreation of the events that led to one of the last executions in New Zealand.
Albert Black, known as the 'jukebox killer', was only twenty when he was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland on 26 July 1955. His crime fuelled growing moral panic about teenagers, and he was to hang less than five months later, the second-to-last person to be executed in New Zealand.
But what really happened? Was this a love crime, was it a sign of juvenile delinquency? Or was this dark episode in our recent history more about our society's reaction to outsiders?
Black's final words, as the hangman covered his head, were, 'I wish you all a merry Christmas, gentlemen, and a prosperous New Year.' This is his story.
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58
Bondi Terror: The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath
Sharri Markson, Alex Ryvchin
4.1
Bondi Terror tells the story of the deadliest terror attack in Australian history - in gripping, minute-by-minute detail. The attack would leave 15 people dead, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, and dozens more severely wounded. Bondi Terror reconstructs the massacre in real time, from the first shot fired, and captures the chilling stories of those present, including split-second decisions that would mean the difference between life and death.Drawing on hours of harrowing eyewitness testimony from survivors, witnesses and first responders, Bondi Terror delves into the human psyche, and the fear and love that drove ordinary Australians as they fought bravely to save each other and stay alive. Gripping and meticulously researched, this is a piercing portrait of the victims, the killers and the heroes who tried to stop them. As Australia's leading chroniclers of antisemitism, Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin examine how Australia found itself in the slipstream of terror, and how life would change forever on a summer's afternoon at the nation's most famous beach.
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59
A Land of Two Halves
Joe Bennett
4.1
After 10 years in New Zealand, Joe Bennett asked himself what on earth he was doing there. Other than his dogs, what was it about these two small islands on the edge of the world that had kept him—an otherwise restless traveller—for really much longer than they seemed to deserve? Bennett thought he'd better pack his bag and find out. Hitching around both the intriguingly named North and South Islands, with an eye for oddity and a taste for conversation, Bennett began to remind himself of the reasons New Zealand is quietly seducing the rest of the world.
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60
Just for Now (Escape to New Zealand, #3)
Rosalind Jame
4.1
For teacher Jenna McKnight, nothing spells “heartbreak” like finding her husband with somebody else--in her bed. It’s clearly time to reinvent herself. A new body, a new city, and a new job later, she’s done just that. The beautiful Auckland villa isn’t really her home, though. Finn Douglas and his kids aren’t really her family, however much she wishes they were. And playing house can be a dangerous game.
Rugby star Finn Douglas is just looking for a temporary nanny and housekeeper. Not a girlfriend, and definitely not a wife. He can’t resist Jenna’s cooking, it’s true. Who knew he’d have so much trouble resisting her? He wants to do what’s right for his kids. But waiting is so hard ...
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61
A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in Our Culture, History and Everday Life
Annie Potts, Philip Armstrong, et al.
4.1
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62
Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)
Tamsyn Muir
4.1
Gideon the Ninth is the most fun you'll ever have with a skeleton.
The Emperor needs necromancers.
The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.
Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.
Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as necromantic skeletons. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy.
Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon's sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.
Of course, some things are better left dead.
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63
The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa
Vincent O'Malley
4.1
Recommended by Gareth Hughes.
Gareth Hughes
Reccently finished this great book. I wish every Kiwi could read it and learn a little more of our history. Incredible how we commemorate overseas wars but collectively ignore our own foundational war. https://t.co/EZDRbhxb3Y [source]
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64
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
Christina Thompson
4.1
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65
Bulibasha: King Of The Gypsies
Witi Tame Ihimaera
4.1
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66
NZ Frenzy South Island New Zealand 3rd Edition
Scott R Cook
4.0
This is the 2016 3rd edition.
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67
The Chimes
Anna Smaill
4.0
The Chimes is set in a reimagined London, in a world where people cannot form new memories, and the written word has been forbidden and destroyed.
In the absence of both memory and writing is music.
In a world where the past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphemy, all appears lost. But Simon Wythern, a young man who arrives in London seeking the truth about what really happened to his parents, discovers he has a gift that could change all of this forever.
A stunning literary debut by poet and violinist Anna Smaill, The Chimes is a startlingly original work that combines beautiful, inventive prose with incredible imagination.
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68
The Cleaner (Cleaner, #1)
Paul Cleave
4.0
Joe is in control of everything in his simple life, both his day job as a janitor for the police department and his night work. He isn't bothered by the daily news reports of the Christchurch Carver, who, they say, has murdered seven women. Joe knows, though, that the Carver killed only six. He knows that for a fact, and he's determined to find the copycat. He'll punish him for the one, then frame him for the other six. It's the perfect plan because he already knows he can outwit the police. All he needs now is to take care of all the women who keep getting in his way, including his odd, overprotective mother and Sally, the maintenance worker who sees him as a replacement for her dead brother. Then there's the mysterious Melissa, the only woman to have ever understood him, but whose fantasies of blackmail and torture don't have a place in Joe's investigation.
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69
Just Good Friends (Escape to New Zealand, #2)
Rosalind Jame
4.0
Some bets were made to be lost.
Kate Lamonica isn't Koti James's type. Too small. Too dark. And heaps too much work. So it's an easy bet that he can be her friend for six weeks without making a move on her, no matter what his mates would have said.
Kate can't believe she's made the bet at all. New Zealand had seemed like the perfect escape from the stalker who'd threatened first her peace of mind, and then her life. She certainly doesn't need any more trouble. Why on earth has she agreed to spend time with a Maori rugby player who's far too handsome and charming for his own good--and knows it?
But there's more than one game Koti's good at playing...
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70
Mutiny on the Bounty
Peter FitzSimons
4.0
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71
Just Come Over (Escape to New Zealand #12)
Rosalind Jame
4.0
Rhys Fletcher is not in love with his sister-in-law. That would be a very, very bad idea, and he doesn’t entertain bad ideas. He also doesn’t lie to himself.
Both of those things can’t be true, so he’ll do what he’s done since the long-ago night when his brother, Dylan, turned up in an Auckland bar after a brutal rugby match between their two teams, and introduced his new girlfriend—a dark-eyed, impossibly short, much-too-young girl named Zora.
He’ll lie.
Now, his brother’s gone, and Rhys is back in New Zealand and settling into his new job as the head coach of the Auckland Blues. Surely, being there for Dylan’s widow and their son is the right thing to do. Until he gets a call from his lawyer, and flies to the States to find that handsome, charming, endlessly irresponsible Dylan has left yet another loose end for his big brother to sort out.
This one is six years old. And her birth certificate says she belongs to Rhys.
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72
The Tricksters
Margaret Mahy
4.0
Reality and the supernatural intertwine in this exciting and chilling novel from an award-winning author; As the Hamiltons gather at their holiday beach house, Carnival's Hide, for their Christmas celebrations, the warm, chaotic familty atomosphere is chilled by the unexpected arrival of three sinister brothers. Who are they? Where are they from? Only 17-year-old Harry, the middle daughter, is close to seeing the truth. Are these brothers her own invention, or are they truly descendants of Teddy Carnival who drowned there many years earlier? As the brothers gradually reveal their purpose, long-hidden family secrets are also unfurled. No one emerges unscarhed...
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73
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific
Robert Lecki
4.0
Now the inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC
Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts to ever come out of the Second World War. Robert Leckie was 21 when he enlisted in the US Marine Corps in January 1942. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his journey, from boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war's fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifice of war, painting an unsentimental portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and all too often die in the defence of their country.
From the live-for-today rowdiness of Marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what it's really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow is a gripping account from an ordinary soldier fighting in extraordinary conditions. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come.
Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem.Robert Leckie's theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who - somehow - survived- Tom Hanks
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74
Colour Scheme (Roderick Alleyn, #12)
Ngaio Marsh
4.0
A spa-goer resorts to murder.
Even down in New Zealand, war-fueled spy fever is running wild. Near the decaying sulphur springs of Colonel and Mrs. Claire, the strange lights and signals being sent to foreign ships at sea mean there's a spy in their midst. Soon an even darker sign appears--a health-seeker with untoward intentions meets his demise in the mud baths. And when a new arrival appears, one who possesses the cunning of a criminal and the insight of a psychologist, can Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn be far behind?
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75
The Pants of Perspective: One Woman's 3,000 Kilometre Running Adventure through the Wilds of New Zealand
Anna McNuff
4.0
"When I ran, I ran for pleasure. I didn’t run for times, to win, to impress: I ran for me. When I ran my bum cheeks rubbed together, so much so that if I was going on a long run I’d have to ‘lube up’. I maintained that I was not a ‘real’ runner – I just liked to run so that I could eat cake." Anna was never anything like those ‘real’ runners on telly – all spindly limbs, tiny shorts and split times – but when she read about New Zealand’s 3,000-kilometre-long Te Araroa Trail, she began to wonder… perhaps being a ‘real’ runner was overrated. Maybe she could just run it anyway? Travelling alone through New Zealand’s backcountry for 148 days, she scrambled through forests, along ridge-lines, over mountain passes, along beaches and across swollen rivers. Running up to 52 kilometres in a day, she slept wild most nights, and was taken into the homes and hearts of the kiwi people in between. The Pants of Perspective is a witty, colourful and at times painfully raw account of a journey to the edge of what a woman believes herself to be capable of. It is a coming-of-age story which will lead you on a roller coaster ride through fear, vulnerability, courage and failure. For anyone who has ever dreamt of taking on a great challenge, but felt too afraid to begin – this story is for you.
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76
Tu
Patricia Grace, Te Ohorere Kaa, Wiremu Kaa
4.0
In this new novel acclaimed Maori novelist Patricia Grace visits the often terrifying and complex world faced by men of the Maori Battalion in Italy during World War II.
Tu is proud of his name--the Maori god of war. But for the returned soldier there's a shadow over his own war experience in Italy. Three brothers went to war, but only one returned--Tu is the sole survivor.
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77
A Good Keen Man
Barry Crump
4.0
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.
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78
Can You Tolerate This?
Ashleigh Young
4.0
A dazzling—and already prizewinning—collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.
Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.
Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.
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79
Dark Emu
Bruce Pascoe
4.0
Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for precolonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.
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80
New Zealand
Lyn Larson
4.0
Pack your bags! We're headed to New Zealand. On this whirlwind tour, you'll learn all about the country's landscape, culture, people, and more. We'll explore New Zealand's active volcanoes and narrow fjords, see the kiwi and kakapo birds, watch a rugby game, and taste a special feast called the hangi. A special section introduces New Zealand's capital, language, population, and flag. Hop on board and take a fun-filled look at your world!
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81
Fodor's Essential New Zealand (Full-color Travel Guide)
Fodor's Travel Guides
4.0
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82
NZ Frenzy North Island New Zealand 3rd Edition
Scott R Cook
4.0
This is the new 2016 3rd edition.
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83
The God Boy
Ian Cross, Roger Robinson
4.0
Set in a small town in New Zealand, the story is told through the eyes of a gauche thirteen year-old boy called Jimmy Sullivan. It is the haunting tale of a young boy growing up in a catholic household, seeing things he shouldn't and struggling to cope. The book appears to be domestic in scope and provincial in vision, but by the end of the novel, the reader has encountered murder, and witnessed the warping of a promising mind and the destruction of a family. In this deceptively modest masterpiece, the cruelty beneath society's surface is revealed, all the more devastingly so through the ordinariness of the location.
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84
The Rehearsal
Eleanor Catton
4.0
All the world's a stage - and nowhere is it that more true than at an all-girls high school, particularly one where a scandal has just erupted. When news spreads of a high school teacher's relationship with his underage student, participants and observers alike soon take part in an elaborate show of concern and dismay. But beneath the surface of the teenage girls' display, there simmers a new awareness of their own power. They obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy, and approbation native to any adolescent girl, under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.
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85
Manu the Kiwi of Kindness
Rosie Chenault and Beth Siddorn
4.0
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86
Melting into You (Stewart Island, #2)
Tracey Alvarez and Sunset Rose Book
4.0
Big, sexy men who don’t relate well to kids need not apply…
Kezia Murphy plays her widow card well. When you don’t trust people not to let you down, it’s easier to not get involved—and getting involved with a man who makes her skin sizzle just by looking at him would be una pazzia—crazy! Four years ago while Kezia’s daughter, Zoe, battled leukaemia, a tragic accident stole her husband’s life. Starting over in the little town of Oban where she’s adopted into the close knit community on Stewart Island, Kezia and her daughter are all the family the other needs. Except Zoe yearns for more.
New Zealand’s worst candidate for instant fatherhood…
Ben doesn’t do gooey emotional stuff. He doesn’t do cosy home and family. And he sure isn’t the big teddy-bear Kezia Murphy, the woman he secretly fantasises about, thinks he is. So when Jade, his surprise eight-year-old daughter arrives on his doorstep, he’s a D-minus student struggling to pass a crash-course in parenting.
They’ll either melt or raze their lives to the ground…
When the sparks of attraction between Kezia and Ben fan into an inferno, Ben doesn’t know how much longer the layers of resistance around his heart can resist melting into the gooey mess he fears. The more he fights it the harder it is to make the choice that will destroy the family he now longs to claim.
(This a previously-published edition of ASIN B00KVP3042.)
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87
The Wives of Henry Oades
Johanna Moran
4.0
Exploring the intricacies of marriage, the construction of family, the changing world of the late 1800s, and the strength of two remarkable women, Johanna Moran turns this unusual family’s story into an unforgettable page-turning drama.
When Henry Oades accepts an accountancy post in New Zealand, his wife, Margaret, and their children follow him to exotic Wellington. But while Henry is an adventurer, Margaret is not. Their new home is rougher and more rustic than they expected—and a single night of tragedy shatters the family when the native Maori stage an uprising, kidnapping Margaret and her children.
For months, Henry scours the surrounding wilderness, until all hope is lost and his wife and children are presumed dead. Grief-stricken, he books passage to California. There he marries Nancy Foreland, a young widow with a new baby, and it seems they’ve both found happiness in the midst of their mourning—until Henry’s first wife and children show up, alive and having finally escaped captivity.
Narrated primarily by the two wives, and based on a real-life legal case, The Wives of Henry Oades is the riveting story of what happens when Henry, Margaret, and Nancy face persecution for bigamy. Exploring the intricacies of marriage, the construction of family, the changing world of the late 1800s, and the strength of two remarkable women, Johanna Moran turns this unusual family’s story into an unforgettable page-turning drama.
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88
Wake
Elizabeth Knox
4.0
An invisible monster is what you can't see coming. With an invisible monster you never know when you're in danger and when you're safe—if you retreat to your fortress you can't be sure you haven't locked it in with you. The invisible monster is something on which no one is an expert. But everyone has the same relationship to it. It could just as well be peering over your shoulder as mine.
On a sunny spring morning the settlement of Kahukura in Tasman is suddenly overwhelmed by a mysterious mass insanity. A handful of survivors find themselves cut off from the world, and surrounded by the dead. As the group of try to take care of one another, and survive in ever more difficult circumstances, it becomes apparent that this isn't the first time that this has happened, and that they aren't all survivors and victims - two of them are something quite other. And, it seems, they are trapped with something. Something unseen is picking at the loose threads of their characters, corrupting, provoking, and haunting them.
Wake is a book that asks: 'What are the last things left when the worst has happened?' It is a book about extreme events, ordinary people, heroic compassion—and invisible monsters.
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89
Lucky 666: The Impossible Mission
Bob Drury
4.0
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90
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding
Robert Hughes
4.0
The history of the birth of Australia which came out of the suffering and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system. With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.
One of the greatest non-fiction books I've ever read . . . Hughes brings us an entire world. --Los Angeles Times
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91
Baby No-Eyes
Patricia Grace
4.0
Tawera and his sister are inseparable, in a relationship that is impossible for others to share. In fact his whole whanau is bonded by secrets, a genealogy stitched together by shame, joy, love, and sometimes grief.Patricia Grace's major new novel merges recent headlines with stories of a heartfelt family history. It is an account of the mysteries that operate at many levels between generations, where the present is the pivot, the center of the spiral, looking outward to the past and future that define it.
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92
The Priests of Ferris
Maurice Gee
4.0
A hundred turns have passed since Susan Ferris joined the Halves and ended the rule of the Halfmen of O, Otis Claw and Otis Cling. But Humankind has chosen evil a second time. O is now in the hands of the priests of Ferris who use Susan's name to terrorize the world. A prophecy among the Stonefolk, dreams of the long-dead Jimmy Jaspers and a great white bear, a flower called Shy, and a message from a girl named Soona all draw Susan back to the world of O where she must face the High Priest and destroy the Temple. Susan is afraid, her task seems impossible, but she is angry too, that her name should be used as an instrument of terror. She wants to rush to the Temple and break it down with her hands, but Soona must be rescued first, and naturally the High Priest has a plan of his own.
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93
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz
4.0
Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone BeforeTwo centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain's adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today's Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.
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94
Guardian of the Dead
Karen Healey
4.0
"You're Ellie Spencer." I opened my mouth, just as he added, "And your eyes are opening."
Seventeen-year-old Ellie Spencer is just like any other teenager at her boarding school. She hangs out with her best friend, Kevin; she obsesses over Mark, a cute and mysterious bad boy; and her biggest worry is her paper deadline.
But then everything changes. The news headlines are all abuzz about a local string of killings that share the same morbid trademark: the victims were discovered with their eyes missing. Then a beautiful yet eerie woman enters Ellie's circle of friends and develops an unhealthy fascination with Kevin, and a crazed old man grabs Ellie in a public square and shoves a tattered Bible into her hands, exclaiming, "You need it. It will save your soul." Soon, Ellie finds herself plunged into a haunting world of vengeful fairies in an epic battle for immortality.
Debut author Karen Healey introduces a savvy and spirited heroine with a fresh, strong voice. Full of deliciously creepy details, this incredible adventure is a deftly crafted story of Māori mythology, romance, and betrayal.
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95
The Lagoon: A Collection of Short Stories
Janet Frame
4.0
This collection of stories - Janet Frame's first published book - appeared in New Zealand in 1951, while she was confined in a mental hospital. It won the Hubert Church Award, and a threatened brain operation was averted. These stories bring into focus a crucial turning point in her life.
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96
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It
Neal Bascomb
4.0
There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be beyond the limits of human foot speed, and in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three world-class runners each set out to break this barrier.
Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — still driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged son of a genteel Australian family, who as a boy preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly in an almost spiritual attempt to shape his body to this singular task. Then there was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm boy and natural athlete who believed he was just plain better than everybody else.
Spanning three continents and defying the odds, their collective quest captivated the world and stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, and such legendary figures as Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, and Ben Hogan. In the tradition of Seabiscuit and Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves us with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.
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97
Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny
Mike Dash
4.0
It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java, for the company had also sent along a new employee, Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a bankrupt and disgraced man who possessed disarming charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, Jeronimus soon sparked a mutiny that seemed certain to succeed - but for one unplanned event: In the dark morning hours of June 3, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The commander of the ship and the skipper evaded the mutineers by escaping in a tiny lifeboat and setting a course for Java to summon help. Nearly all of the passengers survived the wreck and found themselves trapped on a bleak coral island without water, food, or shelter. Leaderless, unarmed, and unaware of Jeronimus' treachery, they were at the mercy of the mutineers.
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98
I Need a New Butt!
Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird
4.0
"A silly story that will cause boys and girls to giggle from beginning to end!" — Norman Public Schools
A young boy suddenly notices a big problem — his butt has a huge crack! So he sets off to find a new one. Will he choose an armor-plated butt? A rocket butt? A robot butt? Find out in this quirky tale of a tail, which features hilarious rhymes and delightful illustrations. Children and parents will love this book — no ifs, ands, or butts about it!
"I can assure you right now that your kids will love this book. They will giggle, they will laugh, and they will want this book to be read over and over again because it is just plain silly and funny … the perfect kid-combo." — Storywraps
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99
Lonely Planet Hiking & Tramping in New Zealand
Lonely Planet, Andrew Bain, et al.
4.0
Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher
Lonely Planet's Hiking & Tramping in New Zealand is your passport to the most relevant and up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Spot seals and laze on golden sands along the Abel Tasman Coast Track; explore The Lord of the Rings scenery on Tongariro Northern Circuit; and tramp through ancient rainforest and along gnarly ridges on the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk. All with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of New Zealand's trails and begin your journey now!
Inside Lonely Planet's Hiking & Tramping in New Zealand:
Colour maps and images throughout Great hiking and itineraries sections show you how to tailor your trip around the best trails Special features on clothing & equipment, hiking safety and other non-hiking outdoor activities Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Budget-oriented recommendations with honest reviews - including eating and sleeping reviews of towns and hiking destinations Cultural insights provide a richer and more rewarding travel experience - covering history, landscapes, geology and wildlife Covers Northland, Auckland, Coromandel, Tongariro, Urewera, Central North Island, Taranaki, Whanganui, Around Wellington, Queen Charlotte, Marlborough, Abel Tasman, Kahurangi, Nelson Lakes, Canterbury, Arthur's Pass, Aoraki/Mt Cook, West Coast, Mt Aspiring National Park, Around Queenstown, Fiordland, Stewart Island/Rakiura. The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet's Hiking & Tramping in New Zealand is our most comprehensive guide to hiking in New Zealand, and is perfect for those planning to explore the country on foot.
Looking for more information on New Zealand? Check out Lonely Planet's New Zealand guide for a comprehensive look at what the country has to offer.
About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, nine international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.
'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times
'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)
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100
Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century
Peter Graham
4.0
On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme--better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry--and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline's mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline's mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora's determination to keep them apart. Their incredible story made shocking headlines around the world and would provide the subject for Peter Jackson's Academy Award-nominated film, Heavenly Creatures.
A sensational trial followed, with speculations about the nature of the girls' relationship and possible insanity playing a key role. Among other things, Parker and Hulme were suspected of lesbianism, which was widely considered to be a mental illness at the time. This mesmerizing book offers a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial and shares dramatic revelations about the fates of the young women after their release from prison. With penetrating insight, this thorough analysis applies modern psychology to analyze the shocking murder that remains one of the most interesting cases of all time.
