Helen Davenport, governess for a wealthy London household, spots an advertisement seeking young women to marry New Zealand's honorable bachelors and begins correspondence with a gentleman farmer. When her church offers to pay her travels under an unusual arrangement, she jumps at the opportunity. On the ship, she meets Gwyneira Silkham, traveling to meet a New Zealand baron who won her in a game of blackjack. When their new husbands turn out to be very different than expected, the women must help one another find the life they'd hoped for.

For children.

"It opens to a spring day, when a middle-aged doctor named Dao-sheng leaves the mountaintop Taoist monastery where he has been living and sets out for the Region of the South, to the city he had once visited thirty years earlier and where his life had been irrevocably changed. He had then been a strapping but poor young musician traveling with a theater troupe. One evening, during a performance, he caught the eye of a well-born young woman named Lan-ying. Their contact lasted but a minute, but to them it felt like an eternity. For this act of audacity he was banished to hard labor by the girl's jealous fiance, the dissipated scion of a powerful family, who had witnessed their exchange and grasped its significance. Across the decades of a life spent either on the run or hiding out in monasteries, where he mastered medicine and divination, Dao-sheng never forgot Lan-ying. One exchange of glances had sealed something forever, something whose enduring power would decide their fates."--BOOK JACKET.

"Lark recounts...the sometimes peaceful, sometimes uneasy relationship between the Maori natives and the pakeha--the colonists. And the land, which can be rocky and formidable and also breathtakingly beautiful, is as much a character as anyone else." --Historical Novel Society New Zealand, 1893: William Martyn is better educated and more cultivated than the other men breaking their backs searching for gold near Queenstown. William is the son of landed Irish nobility, and he comes to town ready to invest in the best equipment. On his search for supplies, he encounters spirited and beautiful young Elaine O'Keefe, who promptly falls in love with him. He is captivated by her charms until Kura, Elaine's half-Maori cousin, comes to visit. William succumbs at once to Kura's exotic beauty and free-spiritedness, and tension develops not only between the two cousins but also between the colonial settlers and their Maori neighbors.

Filled with artistry and images, this book showcases the work of twenty-seven established and emerging artists in the area of science fiction and fantasy art. From the utterly bizarre and remarkable, to the down-right creepy, it is suitable for all science fiction and fantasy fans as well as those interested in art and graphic design.

New Zealand-Aotearoa-Land of the Long White Cloud: the island remnants of the sunken continent of Zealandia. But there is something else... Herein lies the cosmic horror of the Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos in an anthology featuring Lovecraftian tales from some of New Zealand's finest speculative fiction writers.