The Absolute Book
The Absolute Book

Author: Elizabeth Knox

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2021-03-18

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 140594725X

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DISCOVER THE ENCHANTING EPIC THAT WILL TRANSPORT YOU TO OTHER WORLDS . . . 'AN INSTANT CLASSIC' GUARDIAN 'BEWITCHING' THE TIMES 'MIND-BLOWING' LAINI TAYLOR 'ASTOUNDING' FRANCIS SPUFFORD 'GORGEOUSLY WRITTEN' DEBORAH HARKNESS _______ Taryn Cornick barely remembers the family library. Since her sister was murdered, she's forgotten so much. Now it's all coming back. The fire. The thief. The scroll box. People are asking questions about the library. Questions that might relate to her sister's murder. And something called The Absolute Book. A book in which secrets are written - and which everyone believes only she can find. They insist Taryn be the hunter. But she knows the truth. She is the hunted . . . _______ The Absolute Book is a tale of sisters, ancient blood, a forgotten library, murder, revenge and a book that might just have the answer to everything. 'An instant classic . . . A work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Everything fantasy should be: original, magical, well read, compelling' GUARDIAN 'Astonishing. Gripping. Hugely ambitious. An extraordinary conclusion. Admire the sheer scope and grandeur' DAILY MAIL 'A marvellous argument for stories. There are Norse gods, references to Merlin, a tour through purgatory and a strange parallel world where magic is real and humans are bit players in the clash of supernatural realms. Bewitching' THE TIMES 'Contains multitudes, spanning the geographies of Canada, Britain and New Zealand; the cosmologies of fairies, demons and angels; and the genres of thriller, domestic realism and epic fantasy . . . I'm in awe of it' NEW YORK TIMES Review of Books 'Intricately plotted and gorgeously written, THE ABSOLUTE BOOK has something for everyone . . . Here is a cinematic tale that is by turns dark and dreamlike, yet ultimately hopeful' DEBORAH HARKNESS, author of A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES 'Fantastical' THE TIMES 'Savour and absorb the world Knox conjures' SUNDAY TIMES 'Gorgeous. The payoffs and reveals are mind-blowing' LAINI TAYLOR, author of DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE 'An angelic book, an apocalyptic book, an astounding book' FRANCIS SPUFFORD

The Luminaries
The Luminaries

Author: Eleanor Catton

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 822

ISBN-13: 0316126950

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The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 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 cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into 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 at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.

The Bone People
The Bone People

Author: Keri Hulme

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-04-01

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780807130728

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Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment. Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

New Zealand Stories
New Zealand Stories

Author: Katherine Mansfield

Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

Published: 2013-10-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1775535002

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Ten stories from the ‘brilliant’ Katherine Mansfield set in New Zealand. As Vincent O’Sullivan states, those encountering Mansfield’s stories for the first time have invariably found they ‘were alive, they were witty, they were moving, they covered new ground’. But with about 70 stories to choose from and a vast array of themes and approaches, where do you start, and how do you begin to understand and best appreciate her writing and achievements? This series features selections of her best stories, grouped by subject and introduced by Mansfield scholar Vincent O’Sullivan, who is also a writer of fiction in his own right. Each volume offers a different way to view Mansfield’s work. This selection includes her most-loved stories about the New Zealand of her childhood. As O'Sullivan explains, his choices cover ‘everything of importance that happened to her, that she observed and experienced, between childhood in Wellington’s wooden houses, to her deciding in Switzerland in July 1922, that her final paragraph about a singing bird was the place for her to stop’. Other titles in the MANSFIELD SELECTIONS series: In Bavaria: ISBN 978-1-77553-498-3 Marriage & Families: ISBN 978-1-77553-501-0 Sex & Lies: ISBN 978-1-77553-499-0 Women Alone: ISBN 978-1-77553-502-7

Some Other Country
Some Other Country

Author: Marion McLeod

Publisher: Williams Publishing

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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"The country to be found in these pages is not the place depicted in glossy picture books or economic profiles. But it is a real place, composed of that blend of accuracy and vision which only the imagination, committed to language and experience, can supply. It is the New Zealand of Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield, of Dan Davin and Frank Sargeson, of Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace." "Some other Country is a collection of stories selected from the body of New Zealand writing that began with the work of the young expatriate writer, Katherine Mansfield. This updated edition begins in 1922 and ends with a story published in 1990. It includes recent work by Vincent O'Sullivan, Owen Marshall and Keri Hulme and stories by newer writers such as Barbara Anderson and John Cranna, alongside well-known stories by Joy Cowley, C.K. Stead and James Courage. It represents the editor's choice of simply 'the best we could find'."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Being Chinese
Being Chinese

Author: Helene Wong

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2016-05-09

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0947492399

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This is the story of a quest I began three decades ago – the search for my Chinese identity. The path I travelled was not linear, and the years brought pain as well as joy. But, while this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life is universal. I hope that others in our culturally diverse society will find their own ways to embark on that same journey. Helene Wong was born in New Zealand in 1949, to parents whose families had emigrated from China one or two generations earlier. Preferring invisibility, she grew up resisting her Chinese identity. But in 1980 she travelled to her father’s home village in southern China and came face to face with her ancestral past. What followed was a journey to come to terms with ‘being Chinese’. Helene Wong writes eloquently about her New Zealand childhood, about student life in the 1960s, and coming of age in Muldoon’s New Zealand. What her Chinese ancestry means to her gradually illuminates the book as it sheds new light on her own life. Drawing on her experience of writing for New Zealand films, she takes the narrative forward through the places of her family’s history – the ancestral village of Sha Tou in Zengcheng county, the rural town of Utiku where the Wongs ran a thriving business, the Lower Hutt suburbs of her childhood, and Avalon and Naenae.

The Penguin History of New Zealand
The Penguin History of New Zealand

Author: Michael King

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 1459623754

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New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. The Penguin History of New Zealand, a new book for a new century, tells that story in all its colour and drama. The narrative that emerges in an inclusive one about men and women, Maori and Pakeha. It shows that British motives in colonising New Zealand were essentially humane; and that Maori, far from being passive victims of a 'fatal impact', coped heroically with colonisation and survived by selectively accepting and adapting what Western technology and culture had to offer. This book, a triumphant fruit of careful research, wide reading and judicious assessment, was an unprecedented best-seller from the time of its first publication in 2003.

The Bone People
The Bone People

Author: Keri Hulme

Publisher:

Published: 2023-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781776950744

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This novel is one of a dozen classics released in the Popular Penguin format to mark 50 years of publishing in New Zealand. The format reaches further back to 1935, when Allen Lane founded Penguin Books with a clear vision- 'We believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.' Winner of the Booker Award, this powerful and mesmerising novel tracks the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage- Kerewin, an artist estranged from her family and art; a mute boy called Simon, who tries to steal from her; and his tender but brutal foster father Joe.

The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid
The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid

Author: Catherine Robertson

Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

Published: 2011-09-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1869795830

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A romping chick-lit with heart-ache, misunderstandings, travel and love. No one knows 'happy endings' like romance novelist Darrell Kincaid. She's delivered eight of them to her readers with pleasure. But it's not to be with book number nine. In the act of adding the final full stop, Darrell has a revelation: it's not the ending that really matters but what comes next. Darrell now sees that when her husband Tom died (twenty-one months and three days ago, but who's counting?) she lost more than the man she loved. She lost her own 'happy ever after'. The life she expected to live has gone, vanished forever in a puff of fickle, unfair smoke. Darrell knows she has a choice. She can stay in New Zealand and live a half-life, or she can leave in search of something - perhaps someone - else. So Darrell decides upon London, the least romantic capital she knows (why set yourself up for disappointment?). Armed with Nancy Mitford's Love In A Cold Climate as her guide to proper Englishness and the ideal romantic hero, she sets out to live the sweet second life she deserves. The Catherine Robertson Trilogy Book 1: The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid Book 2: The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence Book 3: The Misplaced Affections of Charlotte Forbes