In the Time of the Manaroans

In the Time of the Manaroans
Author: Miro Bilbrough
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1776563727

At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.

Monsters in the Garden

Monsters in the Garden
Author: David Larsen
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 177656376X

Too stuffy inside? All those familiar social realist furnishings, all those comfortable literary tropes. Perhaps a stroll out under the trees, where things are breezier, stranger, more liable to break the rules. You may meet monsters out there, true. But that's the point. Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians &– one of which includes the first description of atmospheric aerobreaking in world literature &– to the bleeding edge of now. Spaceships and worried sheep. Dragons and AI. The shopping mall that swallowed the Earth. The deviant, the fishy and the rum, all bioengineered for your reading pleasure.Featuring stories by some of the country's best known writers as well as work from exciting new talent, Monsters in the Garden invites you for a walk on the wild side. We promise you'll get back safely. Unchanged? Well, that's another question.

Soldiers

Soldiers
Author: Tom Remiger
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1925923266

Winner of the 2019 Michael Gifkins Prize for an Unpublished Novel, Soldiers is a raw and empathetic portrait of young soldiers as they come of age in the chaos of war.

State Highway One

State Highway One
Author: Sam Coley
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781869714260

This is what I want to do. I want to go home. I want you to come with me.'I want to go from here . . .'Finger on Cape Reinga.'. . . to here.'Finger at the bottom of Stewart Island, right at the bottom of the map.It's been years since Alex was in New Zealand, and years since he spent any one-on-one time with his twin sister, Amy. When they lose their parents in a shock accident it seems like the perfect time to reconnect as siblings. To reconnect with this country they call 'home'.As they journey the length of State Highway One, they will scratch at wounds that have never healed - and Alex will be forced to reckon with what coming home really means.

Faking It

Faking It
Author: Kyle Mewburn
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0143775197

Kyle Mewburn grew up in the sunburnt, unsophisticated Brisbane suburbs of the 1960s and '70s in a household with little love and no books, with a lifelong feeling of being somehow wrong – like ‘strawberry jam in a spinach can'. In this book, Kyle describes this early life and her journey to becoming her own person – a celebrated children’s book author, a husband and, finally, a woman. She shares the dreams, the prejudice and the agony of growing up trans and coming out, the lengthy physical ordeal of facial feminisation surgery, and her experiences as a woman – good, bad and creepy. This is a heartbreaking, often hilarious, candid true story about what it means to hide from yourself, your partner and the world, and then to attain the freedom and acceptance of being yourself. A story with the bittersweet beauty you’d expect from the writer of Old Huhu that is relevant for anyone wanting to know and understand the trans experience – or anyone wanting to discover who they are and what they are meant to be.

This Pākehā Life

This Pākehā Life
Author: Alison Jones
Publisher: Bridget Williams Books
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1988587255

'This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā – and other New Zealanders – curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori.' A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pākehā and Māori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.

Canticle Creek

Canticle Creek
Author: Adrian Hyland
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1761150359

‘The rural crime fiction wave continues with this brilliant new arid drama.’ - Australian Women's Weekly ‘The writing is generous and whip-smart, with sentences that will stop readers in their tracks to savour them ... Heart-racing twists propel the novel to its denouement, while the oppressive heat and arid landscape add an extra layer of threat to the unfolding drama.’- Books + Publishing Two bodies. One long hot summer. A town that will never be the same. When Adam Lawson's wrecked car is found a kilometre from Daisy Baker’s body, the whole town assumes it’s an open and shut case. But Jesse Redpath isn’t from Canticle Creek. Where she comes from, the truth often hides in plain sight, but only if you know where to look. When Jesse starts to ask awkward questions, she uncovers a town full of contradictions and a cast of characters with dark pasts, secrets to hide and even more to lose. As the temperature soars, and the ground bakes, the wilderness surrounding Canticle Creek becomes a powderkeg waiting to explode. All it needs is one spark. A twisty crime thriller set in small town Australia perfect for readers of The Dry and Scrublands. PRAISE FOR CANTICLE CREEK ‘Hyland, a seasoned firefighter, ensures the climactic inferno takes your breath away. More please.’ - The Times ‘An atmospheric gripper.’ - Crime Monthly ‘Canticle Creek had me gripped from beginning to end.’ - Lovereading

Bug Week

Bug Week
Author: Airini Beautrais
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1776563824

A science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger's party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.

Open Secrets

Open Secrets
Author: Catriona Menzies-Pike
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 064806218X

The lives of writers are a topic of perennial fascination to readers – and indeed to other writers. And yet the writer at work is often a mythologised figure, distant from the cares of the day. In Open Secrets, Australian writers reflect upon the material conditions that give rise to their writing practice. What is it that writers do with their days? These essays document writing lives defined as much by procrastination, distraction and economic precarity as by desire and imagination, by aesthetic and intellectual commitments. Labour is at the heart of this collection: creative labour, yes, but also the day jobs, side gigs, and care work that make space for writing. Bringing together an eclectic and distinctive set of writers, Open Secrets is a rich and provocative account of contemporary Australian literature. The writers included in the collection are Sunil Badami, Vanessa Berry, Miro Bilbrough, Luke Carman, Lauren Carroll Harris, Maddee Clark, Justin Clemens, Lisa Fuller, Elena Gomez, Eda Gunaydin, Tom Lee, James Ley, Fiona Kelly McGregor, Oliver Mol, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Ellena Savage, McKenzie Wark, Laura Elizabeth Woollett and Fiona Wright. Open Secrets is edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike, editor of the Sydney Review of Book. It follows the collections Second City and The Australian Face, both published by the Sydney Review of Books.