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
Winner - Ockham NZ Book Awards - Illustrated Non-Fiction Award 2020. 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&nb ...Show more
Category: NZ - Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: near fine
Winner - Ockham NZ Book Awards - Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2020 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 ...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: 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 - Fiction | Reading Level: very good
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 - 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 worsh ...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: Art - History and biography
'My painting tells you where I am at any given time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in.' Colin McCahon McCahon (1919-1987) is widely recognised as an outstanding figure in twentieth century art whose ground-breaking work over four decades changed the way we see this country, while eng ...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: 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 Kenne ...Show more
Category: NZ - Fiction
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
