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An evocative and moving mix of memoir and fiction from an award-winning novelist. As war is waged in the Middle East, a woman in New Zealand has her nose in a book. Kate is immersed in other battles, engrossed in eyewitness accounts of an earlier war in ancient Persia. She has grown up, left her Otago home and returned, and in all these years books have shaped her life and made sense of the world - offering mystery and solace, entertainment and enlightenment. From The Little Red Hen to Owls Do Cry, from T.S. Eliot to Aphra Behn, this frequently funny, always original novel is another extraordinary offering from the author of The Hopeful Traveller.
Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. Skinny Louie, daughter of Shanghai Lil, has a baby in the Begonia House on the day of the royal visit. Maura finds the baby and takes it home. Tia grows up with magical powers into the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. The Skinny Louie Book won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.
A fascinating novel of hope, love, idealism and human progress, made up of two separate stories, which can be read in isolation and yet reverberate against each other. Sometime in the 1860s, in an isolated valley on Banks Peninsula, Harry Head, "the Hermit of Hickory Bay", experimented unsuccessfully with flight. His story forms part of the exuberant blend of fact and fiction which constitutes this tale. The author takes us back to the beginnings of novel-writing, as philosophical play and serious entertainment. Think Crusoe's island, think Utopia. Twelve characters, driven by obsession, hope or the vagaries of chance, come ashore in widely different circumstances onto the same island. Once there, the game can begin. Written in two halves, this is a book to be read from either end. Begin with the past and race toward the future, or begin with the present and circle back towards the past. Time may separate the two sections yet subtle links and twisting events bring them together into a varied, intriguing and compulsive whole.
A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a different, slower rhythm. And beneath them all, the planet moves to its own immense geological time. With insight, wide-ranging knowledge and humour, this novel explores the same territory as its non-fiction twin, The Villa at the Edge of th...
A fabulous multi-levelled novel, shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards. Clare Lacey is on a quest. In Ireland to attend an art history conference, she sets out to find her father who walked out one day to buy a packet of cigarettes when she was a child, and disappeared. She is urged on her way by chance encounters: with a woman in a high tower, a blind man at a crossroads, a singer whose song she does not understand . . . Clues lie all around on a labyrinth of walls - but the final clue lies deep within. With Irish roots and a nod to the Irish classic, The Year of the Hiker by John B. Keane, this is a contemporary novel about inheritance, belief, art, love . . . and limestone.
An historical, pastoral, satirical, scientifical romance, with mustelids! A young man out poaching. A beautiful maiden in a mysterious house. A perilous voyage to distant islands. All the ingredients of a highly coloured Victorian romance are played out in the context of the great colonial experiment. Exotic species travelled back to stock the collections of Europe while useful species were dispatched to found new colonies in the antipodes. Walter Allbones really existed. So did his ferrets. From these facts, Fiona Farrell has spun a delicate, satirical fantasy about human folly and the perils attendant on disturbing the subtle balance of nature.
On 22 September 1960, six girls gather behind the school toilets to read Peyton Place: Caroline the leader, Heather the caregiver, Kathy the actress, Raeleen the explorer, Greer the mystic and Margie the rebel. Like the historical heroines whose stories are repeatedly held up to them as models, these girls confront in their various ways the uncertainty and fears of adolescence. On 22 September 1995 we meet them again, confronting the issues of middle age. Caroline's on the way up, Raeleen's now Ra, Margie climbs higher and higher. They re all relearning in the process the joy of making that vital, terrifying, thrilling leap 'out into the sun'...
The Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling memoir from the author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT With an introduction by Ann Patchett *AS FEATURED ON: DESERT ISLAND DISCS, BIG SCOTTISH BOOK CLUB, THE ZOE BALL BOOKCLUB* *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, OBSERVER, RED and THE TELEGRAPH* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE FOR MEMOIR AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2018* 'O'Farrell takes up a bow and arrow and aims right at the human heart' The Times ______ I Am, I Am, I Am is novelist Maggie O'Farrell's unputdownable story of a life told in near-death experiences. A childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismana...
A collection of poems with a light and dancing quality.
The Book of Invasions - Lebor Gabála Ýrenn - is a compilation of manuscripts describing the very specific discovery of Ireland ('on the fifteenth, on a Saturday') following the Creation and the Flood. The Pop-Up Book of Invasions is Fiona Farrell's poetic response to a six-month stay in Ireland as inaugural recipient of the Rathcoola Residency in County Cork. Part travelogue, part family record, part song and myth and history rewritten, this collection revels and laments in equal measure in a landscape deeply inscribed with narrative. The poems in The Pop-up Book draw heavily and vividly on the landscape, history and mythology of Ireland, sharing a sense of discovery, but they also make co...