"The Kowhai Kids banter and play amongst the branches of their tree. They receive visitors some scary some friendly but theyd really like other children to learn about their special tree. Kowhai Kids begins with an info page and ends with an illustrated guide on how to grow a Kowhai tree"

When John Summers moved to a small town in the Wairarapa and began to look closely at the less-celebrated aspects of local life &– our club rooms, freezing works, night trains, hotel pubs, landfills &– he saw something deeper. It was a story about his own life, but mostly about a place and its people. The story was about life and death in New Zealand.Combining reportage and memoir, The Commercial Hotel is a sharp-eyed, poignant yet often hilarious tour of Aotearoa: a place in which Arcoroc mugs and dog-eared political biographies are as much a part of the scenery as the hills we tramp through ill-equipped. We encounter Elvis impersonators, the eccentric French horn player and adventurer Bernard Shapiro, Norman Kirk balancing timber on his handlebars while cycling to his building site, and Summers' s grandmother: the only woman imprisoned in New Zealand for protesting World War Two. And we meet the ghosts who haunt our loneliest spaces.As he follows each of his preoccupations, Summers reveals to us a place we have never quite seen before.&‘ Clever, funny, boundlessly curious, The Commercial Hotel is a dazzling New Zealand opportunity shop, floor to ceiling with lost books and impos

Siobhan Forrester, lead singer of Beneath the Blonde, has everything a girl could want - stunning body, great voice, brilliant career, loving boyfriend. Now she has a stalker too. She can cope with the midnight flower deliveries and nasty phone calls, but things really turn sour when intimidation turns to murder. Saz Martin, hired to seek out the stalker and protect Siobhan, embarks on a whirlwind investigation, travelling with the band from London to New Zealand with plenty of stop-overs. As jobs go, this one shouldn't be too hard, except Siobhan is economic with the truth and Saz isn't sure she wants to keep the relationship strictly business.

A heartfelt, hilarious and warm-hearted memoir of New Zealand in the 1960s. When you walk along the pier under the huge blue sky and with clean surf on either side, you can easily think that New Brighton is the loveliest place in the world. This was once New Zealand’s most bustling township, however it became a parable of New Zealand when the revolution of the eighties and nineties derailed it. New Brighton’s youth grew up in happy anarchy beside its great, glorious beach. In Gods and Little Fishes, Bruce Ansley gives us immediate entry into one such rich, well-lived boyhood and family life. He both captures the freedoms of a childhood many would envy now, and offers a perceptive adult sensibility charged with a partisan view. Not only a marvellous memoir, this is also a superb portrait of a seaside town set in the second half of last century. New Brighton’s playing fields, the pier, the Cubs and Scouts, the main street shops, even the easterly, are given as much character as the township’s old identities. The nuances of family life, the complexities of a marriage, the entanglements of small town relationships, and the very culture of the place are all conveyed with love and humour, as well as a sharp sense of what has been lost. The sound and brilliance of the sea, the wind, the women, the shadow of a generation of men who went to war: all are described with a poetic clarity and dancing wit that will make you long to have lived the author’s boyhood alongside him.

“As a study of fiction, femininity and family it is bursting with intelligence and fire”—from the award-winning author of Death of a She Devil (The Telegraph). Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua—a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet—a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order—has announced to Beverley, her aged grandmother, that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright, he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. How the kehua became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them. “A haunting book . . . The novel is a spirited triumph: adroit, affecting and bung-full of genuine humour and ideas.” —The Guardian “Weldon crafts this traffic between spirit worlds with characteristic wit, and without sacrificing the intricacies of a family’s struggle to accept its past.” —Financial Times “Wonderfully wicked, highly readable.” —Independent

Moteliers Clarry and Lucy Claridge own a twelve-unit establishment in a small town in South Taranaki. On a weekend in March 1999 Morrieson's Motel is fully booked as several events and escapades just happen to coincide. Twelve of New Zealand's leading writers of fiction have combined to write a chapter each of the story of what happened at Morrieson's Motel on this eventful weekend. The result is mayhem, mystery, sex, suicide and an entertaining collection of short fiction. Authors are: Barbara Anderson, Catherine Chidgey, Tessa Duder, Maurice Gee, Kevin Ireland, Stephanie Johnson, Graeme Lay, Sue McCauley, Owen Marshall, Vincent O'Sullivan, Sarah Quigley, and Elizabeth Smither