Category: NZ - Fiction
Winner! of the Ockham NZ Book Awards - Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father's. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father an ...Show more
Category: NZ - History
An illustrated history of protest and activism in Aotearoa New Zealand. For a small, peaceful democracy in the South Pacific, New Zealand has had its fair share of major protest issues, and over the decades New Zealanders have become adept at mobilising around causes. From protest about war &n ...Show more
Category: Music History & Biography | Reading Level: good
Winner - Ockham NZ Book Awards - General Non-Fiction Award 2020 In Dead People I Have Known, the legendary New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known b ...Show more
Category: NZ - Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: near fine
A new poetry collection that takes readers among ‘the unsilent women’, from Hipparchia to J. K. Rowling. ‘Women who speak have always been monstrous. That twisty sphinx, those tempting sirens; better plug your ears with wax, boys.’ Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell ...Show more
Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: very good
In his riveting new novel, internationally bestselling New York Times Notable author and Prix Medicis etranger winner David Vann reimagines his father's final days. Middle-aged and deeply depressed, Jim arrives in California from Alaska and surrenders himself to the care of his brother Gary, who in ...Show more
Category: NZ - Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: near fine
In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage. Beneath their formal dexterity and variety, these études sustain a continuous meditation on the concords and dissonances of worshipful life in an age d ...Show more
Category: Atlases
An extraordinary visual data book like no other. Clustered yet scattered, we New Zealanders live across the country's physical landscapes, experiencing its varied weather and environments. We co-create its political, economic and social systems on a daily basis. Each of us has a particular view of Aotea ...Show more
Category: NZ - Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
Funny, intriguing, lyrical and ultimately moving, this entertaining and insightful novel from one of this country's best writers both skewers and celebrates small town New Zealand. Pat `Pearly' Gates has achieved a lot in his life and evinces considerable satisfaction in his achievements. He has a reput ...Show more
Category: NZ - Fiction | Reading Level: very good
Elizabeth Taylor is a surgeon at a city hospital, a gifted, driven and rare woman excelling in a male-dominated culture. One day, while operating on a young woman in a critical condition, something goes gravely wrong. A Mistake is a compelling story of human fallibility, and the dangerous hunger for bla ...Show more
Category: NZ - Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: very good
The family didn’t know what to do about grief. The noisy house went silent. I was fourteen. I lay on the red rug in the sitting room and listened to Beethoven’s Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, op. 120 – over and over because it was there. In 1973, Anne Kennedy’s brother Philip was ...Show more
Category: NZ - Biography | Reading Level: near fine
Shirley Smith was one of the most remarkable New Zealanders of the 20th century, a woman whose lifelong commitment to social justice, legal reform, gender equality and community service left a profound legacy. She was born in Wellington in 1916. While her childhood was clouded by loss - her mother died ...Show more
Category: Art - History and biography | Reading Level: near fine
A major new history of craft that spans three centuries of making and thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Moana (Pacific). It tells the previously untold story of craft in Aotearoa New Zealand, and proposes a new idea of craft - one that acknowledges Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana histories of ...Show more
