New Zealand Fiction Bestsellers
Access Road By Maurice Gee
This is a novel of family secrets and tensions, and distant past grievances, set like so much of Maurice Gee's fiction in the West
Auckland town of Loomis. It is also vintage Maurice Gee, widely recognised as New Zealand's finest living fiction writer. Publication will be a significant event. New Zealand fiction doesn't get any better than this. Three brothers and sisters, all now in their eighties, two of them living in the old family home, are struggling to cope with events that have happened way back in the past. It all bursts into the open when an old school friend visits Loomis, with malice in his heart. He keeps the biggest secret of all, about the disappearance of a girl many years before. As the novel reaches its climax, the tensions reach breaking point, and violence breaks out. The death of one of the protagonists seems inevitable. More The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones
A boy watches his mother hooked and reeled ashore by a fisherman. A man builds a swing in the backyard to sit between his wife and her lover. A couple gives up their seat on a bus for lovers soon to be parted. A boy sees his mother come to life gliding on roller skates. Lloyd Jones's The Man in the Shed is a haunting collection of stories about family and longing. Jones's extraordinary tales take conventional family situations and tilts them sideways, delivering a memorable, beautiful blend of the suburban and the surreal. More
The 10PM Question By Kate De Goldi
Frankie Parsons is twelve going on old man, an apparently sensible, talented boy with a drumbeat of worrying questions steadily gaining volume in his head: Are the smoke alarm batteriesflat? Does the cat, and therefore the rest of the family, have worms? Will bird flu strike and ruin life as we know it? Is the Kidney-shaped spot on his chest actually a galloping cancer? Only Ma takes seriously his catalogue of persistent queries. More
The Vintner's Luck By Elizabeth Knox
It's Burgundy, 1808. One night Sobran Jodeau, a young vintner, meets an angel in his vineyard: a physically gorgeous creature with huge wings that smell of snow, a sense of humour and an inquiring mind. They meet again every year on the midsummer anniversary of the date. Village life goes on, meanwhile, with its affairs and mysteries, marriages and murders, and the vintages keep improving - though the horror of the Napoleonic wars and into the middle of the century, as science marches on, viticulture changes, and gliders fly like angels.
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Living as a Moon By Owen Marshall
Being a celebrity impersonator, says the Aussie Elton John, is like living your life as a moon. 'We give up identity and become just a reflection of another personality, like the moon having no fire of its own and be just a pale reflection of the sun when it's not there.' This new collection of stories from master short fiction writer Owen Marshall is rich in people exploring their identities and how they are affected by others. There's Patrick, whose life is radically alerted by a random encounter with a killer; widowed Margaret, who faces a new kind of existence alone; David, who experiences the 'spontaneous and passing friendship of strange Ian, whose wife's demands for a better lifestyle lead him to a new career in telephone sex. Set in both Europe and the Antipodes, these twenty-five stories are at once arresting, moving, funny and full of insight into human condition. More
Mister Pip By Lloyd Jones
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.' Bougainville. 1991. A small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. Eighty-six days have passed since Matilda's last day of school as, quietly, war is encroaching from the other end of the island. When the villagers' safe, predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville's children are surprised to find the island's only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. More
As the Earth Turns Silver By Alison Wong
Alison Wong's outstanding first novel is set in Wellington in the early twentieth century and spans the years 1905 to 1922. For most people in the wider community, the area known as Haining Street has an infamous reputation in the city, allegedly full of opium dens, weird food, gambling and strange Chinese cultural practices. Nice Europeans stay away. But for the tiny number of Wellington Chinese, it is a safe haven, a refuge from the scarcely believable and often violent anti-Chinese racism which pervades the wider Wellington community. more
The Angel's Cut By Elizabeth Knox
Boomtown Los Angeles, 1929: the movies have burst into song and speech, and aircraft into the skies at speed. Into this world of soundstages and speakeasies comes Xas, stunt flier and wingless angel, with his German passport and his broken heart, determined only to go on living in the air. What does it take to turn a wind? Will it be Conrad Cole, movie director and aircraft designer, a glory-seeking king of the grand splash who is also a man sinking into his own sovereign darkness. Or will it be Flora McLeod, film editor and maimed former actress, who sees something in Xas that no-one has ever seen before, not even God, who made him, or Lucifer, the general he once followed - Lucifer, who has lost him once but won't let that be the end of it. What does it take to turn a wind? Mountains. Or another wind. More
Cut and Run By Alix Bosco
When a rugby star, who began life on the toughest city streets, is murdered in the arms of a beautiful celebrity, it seems to be an open and shut case
of a drug deal gone wrong. But Anna Markunas, legal researcher for the prime suspect's defence team, begins to uncover a far more sinister truth - a truth that could destroy everything and everyone she cares about most and could, ultimately, destroy her. More
Singularity
Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'ConnorInternational Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award. She has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. In Singularity, her powerful new collection, she has continued to develop the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added. The stories in Singularity cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock in Australia to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each contributes to a unifying narrative. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind five principal characters together. More
A vivid and compelling story of enduring love and divided families from one of our bestselling historical novelists. When armed conflict drives a wedge between Maori and Pakeha, not everyone can choose sides easily. For Isla McKinnon, the choices are bitter. Taken in by local Maori when her parents are brutally murdered, she has grown to womanhood and taken a Maori husband. In a thrilling tale of love and loss from the land wars - when simmering tensions between Maori and the encroaching Pakeha settlements exploded into bloody warfare - love and trust are put cruelly to the test. Separated from her husband and her family and restored to Auckland society, Isla must learn to survive in both worlds. Inevitably, she must decide between them, and lose part of her heart forever. More
Mother's Day By Laurence Fearnley
Life is tough for 40-year-old solo mother Maggie, a home help caregiver. Her three children are all giving her a hard time, especially Bevan, who's in trouble with the police. But when she's assigned a musician in a wheelchair to care for, something new enters her life. Maggie's a singer, Tim a fine guitarist. They'll make music together, but tragedy is just around the corner. Then it's Mother's Day, and Maggie and her family gather...This touching new novel from Laurence Fearnley contains many gems of warmth, affection, love and hope. It confirms her position as one of New Zealand's finest writers. More
About the Author
Laurence Fearnley is the author of seven novels. Edwin and Matilda was runner-up at the 2008 Montana Awards and Room was shortlisted in 2001. She has been awarded several fellowships, notably the 2004 Artists to Antarctica fellowship, the 2006 Island of Residencies fellowship in Tasmania, and the 2007 Robert Burns fellowship at the University of Otago. She lives in Dunedin
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