* WINNER OF A WHITBREAD NOVEL AWARD * A rich portrayal of small-town life with wonderfully evoked characters and beautifully observed writing. Dan Silas returns to America for his high school reunion where he makes some unexpected discoveries. His former girlfriend tells him that her daughter was his child and Dan's oldest friend has suffered a breakdown and now believes himself to be the reincarnation of an Indian chief. In an attempt to make sense of these disturbing facts, Dan digs further into their lives, with both tragic and comic results. 'A wonderfully observed novel which provides a rare outsider's glimpse of the quiet despair that lurks behind those bright, perfectly-formed American smiles' Literary Review

'I come from Mt Roskill. Somebody has to.' So says Garth Cartwright of growing up in New Zealand's largest suburb. It had acres of rugby fields and more churches than anywhere else in the country - but there were no cinemas, music venues or pubs. In search of a little more culture, a young Garth up and moved to London. Twenty years after leaving he returned to revel in a Kiwi summer. That summer was spent travelling the country from top to bottom and observing New Zealand and its citizens in all their eccentric glory. Taking to State Highway 1, he met old friends, cult rockers, aspiring politicians, potters, bikers, visionary artists, hunters, undercover cops and all manner of other Kiwi characters. Surfing, hitching, driving, sailing and tramping across New Zealand allowed him to reflect on how much New Zealand has changed in the last twenty years - and how much it hasn't.

This is a biography of Major John Cartwright (1740-1824), the English advocate of radical reform who had considerable influence in shaping the mainstream of reform in England in the nineteenth century, and whose ideas lay behind the working-class Chartist Movement. Known as the 'Father of Reform', Cartwright was the first person of importance to hold a literal belief in universal male suffrage and was venerated by generations of reformers. Dr Osborne's book clarifies and analyses Cartwright's extensive political plans and ideas against the background of contemporary English radicalism and of social and political change. He shows how Cartwright, as a member of the English landed gentry, tried to understand conditions which were changing at an unprecedented rate and still retained a high degree of traditionalism and conservatism.

Believing deeply that the gospel touched every aspect of a person's life, Peter Cartwright was a man who held fast to his principles, resulting in a life of itinerant preaching and thirty years of political quarrels with Abraham Lincoln. Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher is the first full-length biography of this most famous of the early nineteenth-century Methodist circuit-riding preachers. Robert Bray tells the full story of the long relationship between Cartwright and Lincoln, including their political campaigns against each other, their social antagonisms, and their radical disagreements on the Christian religion, as well as their shared views on slavery and the central fact of their being "self-made." In addition, the biography examines in close detail Cartwright's instrumental role in Methodism's bitter "divorce" of 1844, in which the southern conferences seceded in a remarkable prefigurement of the United States a decade later. Finally, Peter Cartwright attempts to place the man in his appropriate national context: as a potent "man of words" on the frontier, a self-authorizing "legend in his own time," and, surprisingly, an enduring western literary figure.