A funny-but-touching tale about everything that can go wrong...and what makes it all right! Tess Nelson is poised to take a well-deserved step up the corporate ladder when it's yanked out from under her. With no job and nothing to fill her days--just a nonrefundable ticket for a trip to Hawaii--Tess decides a tropical vacation is just what she needs. But Tess's journey to paradise is a disaster from the beginning. A sprained ankle at the airport is just the beginning. Then there's the lost contact lens and the lost luggage, the lightning storm at a luau, and the hotel fire. Not to mention the approaching hurricane. And the attractive, annoying young man who keeps crossing her path--and really shaking her up. All Tess wants to do is get her life back under control. But God, it seems, has something else in mind--like opening her heart to everything her life could be.

The original book, published in 1988, immediately became a classic. It was the first proper history of New Zealand rock and roll, told as a series of inter-linking, anecdotal stories. To buy an original on Amazon.com now costs at least $US150.00 The year 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the first proper rock and roll recording made in New Zealand, a seminal moment immortalised in the book. Now the author has gone back to the original manuscript and revised it with the benefit of hindsight trends or acts which once seemed significant are less so now, while others have grown in historical importance. At the same time, the period from 1988 to the present has been covered in the same style, telling the stories of the more modern genres such as rap and hip hop, the Polynesian music revolution and the extraordinary renaissance of Kiwi music in general.

A Story of letting go Tess Nelson is poised to take a well deserved step up the corporate ladder when it's yanked out from under her.

Castaway in Paradise explores the reality in the myth through the exciting stories of castaways who, because of shipwrecks, perfidious sea captains, or their own choice, found themselves true-life Robinson Crusoes.

The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century. On November 8, 2018, the ferocious Camp Fire razed nearly every home in Paradise, California, and killed at least 85 people. Journalists Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano reported on Paradise from the day the fire began and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Fire in Paradise is their dramatic narrative of the disaster and an unforgettable story of an American town at the forefront of the climate emergency.

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.