Kowhai Kids


Book Description

"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"




The Commercial Hotel


Book Description

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




Should I Pat Pat?


Book Description

"There are two things to know before you even say "Hello." Does the dog have a job to do? Or is he allowed to play with you?, A fun and interactive way to teach children to be safe, and have fun around dogs, while at the same time showing them that there might be more to a dog than meets the eye"--Back cover. Presented in the form of a story, with rhyming text.




Messages about Reading


Book Description




Beneath the Blonde


Book Description

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.




Gods And Little Fishes


Book Description

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.




Kehua!


Book Description

“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




Morrieson's Motel


Book Description

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




Huia Short Stories 3


Book Description

Thirty-five of the best short stories from the 1999 Huia Short Story Awards for Maori writers, judged by Phil Kawana and Trixie Te Arama Menzies.




This Mrs. Kingi


Book Description

"Meet Mrs Kingi - 'a wrinkled-up old Maori woman of no importance', as she calls herself, but to her children, her grandchildren and her neighbours in the Bay of Islands, the very heart and soul of the district. Whether caring for her grandchildren, cooking for all and sundry, keeping lazy wahines up to the mark, deploring male addiction to football, bullying her son-in-law or tidying up people's homes, Mrs Kingi hardly ever rests, except to fish and educate herself from newspapers. She sighs for the good old days and for her long-dead husband, she worries about young Maoris in the present age, yet she has faith in the future and in her people and a deep love for the district of which she is so much a part ... Humour, wisdom and charm season this invigorating story of an archetypal Maori grandmother, with a toughness of character, a glowing charity and a philosophical outlook typical of her race ..."--Jacket