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This rich and darkly funny novel is about family history and the risk and power of knowledge. ‘I want to tell you a story about my mother, although of course it is also mine – inherited, along with dangly earlobes and a horror of deep water.’ Janine’s mother had an obsession: her ancestry. But what she uncovered was a colourful assortment of characters and their penchant for cruelty and abuse. When her mother dies, Janine continues the genealogical search. She buys a run-down house on a tiny island, where she sits and writes up the stories of her forebears, worrying whether the damaging genes have been passed on. Meanwhile the builder, Jake, is erecting a jetty for her, and it is his presence, along with Janine’s discovery about her grandfather, that might offer her hope of redemption. Startlingly original and superbly written, Tanya Moir’s surprising new book asks how much we really want to know about our futures and our pasts.
A powerfully realised novel that weaves the past with the present and the real with the imaginary. In Winstone’s imagination, the Kid and his partner ride through the Wild West on the trail of their quarry. In Winstone’s actual life, he’s had to abandon his 'partner' and is hiding out in the tough landscape of Central Otago. What has this boy run from, and how will the resilient and engaging twelve-year-old survive? This moving, inventive and hard-hitting novel will remain with you long after you have finished the last page. 'Her talent with prose is far reaching; her ability to pluck a clever phrase from a seemingly inexhaustible well of fluid imagination quite stunning.' - Michael Larsen, Weekend Herald Longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Book Awards: 'An unusually subtle treatment of crime . . . Brilliantly paced and plotted, very seriously discomforting reading. A psychological thriller . . . a ripper.'
This is a story of settling in a new land, of hardship, resilience and of love. In 1866, Daniel Peterson and his family give up their comfortable life in London for an unseen farm on Banks Peninsula. Daniel plans to make a fortune growing grass-seed; until he does so, there can be no going back. But the realities of a remote hill country block are very different to the cosy imaginings of a clerk. The Petersons find themselves at the mercy of the land, the weather and their few neighbours - a motley, suspicious assortment of old whalers, escaped convicts, wary French settlers and true-blue Tory squatters. Even their own house has a secret to hide - that of its first inhabitant, the scandalous Etienne La Rochelle and his Maori lover. When Daniel's daughter Hester discovers La Rochelle's journal, it leads her on a journey of discovery - a path into a world of beauty, darkness and illicit love, which she may follow if she dares.
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Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing - collectively referred to as Southern Cross Crime - is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists, such as Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize winning The Luminaries and Jane Harper's big commercial hit, The Dry, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Hailing from two sparsely populated nations on the far edge of the former Empire - neighbours that are siblings in spirit, vastly different in landscape - Australian and New Zealand crime writers offer readers a blend of exotic and familiar, seasoned by distinctive senses of place, outlook, and humour, and roots that trace to the earliest days of ou...
An astoundingly clear adaptation of Tanya, one of the most influential works of Jewish spiritual thought ever written, penned by Chasidic Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812).
'I've long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian Perfumes: The Guide is the culmination of Turin's lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez's stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she's ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.
A magical tale of friendship and wonder—the perfect gift for the imaginative child in all of us. One summer, in a hedge near her family’s cottage in Kenora, five-year-old Susan Coyne discovered an overgrown stone fireplace. Her father said it was the home of Uncle Joe Spondoolak, an elf who’d moved in after the cottage had burned down long ago. Susan, a fanciful child, decided to become keeper of the hearth, tidying it up and leaving little gifts for the elves: handfuls of wild strawberries, daisy chains, a tiny birchbark canoe. Overnight the gifts would disappear. One morning, there was a tiny piece of carefully folded pink paper wedged in between the mossy stones. To Helen Susan Came...
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