Return to Harikoa Bay

Return to Harikoa Bay
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0143776541

‘Whenever I think of coming to punish my father, it’s always in a strong wind, and that’s blowing now as I drive up the long, unsealed track to the house and sheds.’ So begins one of Owen Marshall’s superbly subversive stories. He offers up a wide range of subjects, from untimely deaths to unusual discoveries made about friends or neighbours, from burnishing an overseas trip to a tale about saving a business venture: ‘Just in time,’ said Paddy. ‘I thought I was going to have to resort to giving blow jobs in the office.’ It wasn’t quite as Jane A would have expressed relief, perhaps, but sincere in its own way . . . With over ten years since his last collection of new stories, Marshall explores his fellow New Zealanders, bringing his wisdom and wry eye to his vivid, insightful scenes: ‘Places bring back people, people bring back places, and both conjure the cinema of your past.’

The Unsettled

The Unsettled
Author: Richard Shaw
Publisher: Massey University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2024-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1991016697

After Richard Shaw published his acclaimed memoir The Forgotten Coast in 2021, he made contact with Pakeha with long settler histories who were coming to grips with the truth of their respective families' &‘ pioneer stories' . They were questioning the foundation of aggressive acts of colonisation and land confiscation on which those stories had been constructed.The Unsettled weaves those stories with Shaw' s own and features New Zealanders who are trying to figure out how to live well with their own pasts, their presents and their possible futures. They may be unsettled, but they are doing something about it.It is an indispensable companion for the journey towards understanding the complex and difficult history of the New Zealand Wars and their ongoing aftermath.

The Author's Cut

The Author's Cut
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-06-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0143774840

Chosen by the author from his thirteen previous collections, this latest selection of stories includes 'Coming Home in the Dark', the inspiration for a new feature film. Owen Marshall is regarded as one of our finest living writers. His stories capture the imagination and refuse to let go. From dark to funny, acerbic to warm, they probe our national psyche with clear-eyed insight. This selection from a long career ranges across New Zealand and ventures overseas; the pieces explore both cruelty and love; they look back to childhood and also capture the world we live in today. Full of unexpected turns, lyrical writing, wry observations and intriguing plots, this sampling offers a provocative take on New Zealand. `I very much envy his ability to lay things down in such a way that each one has its natural weight and place, without any straining and heaving.' - Maurice Gee, Sport 'Owen Marshall has established himself as one of the masters of the short story' - Livres Hebdo, Paris

Love as a Stranger

Love as a Stranger
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-03-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1775538737

Brilliantly tracing the progress of unexpected love and the perils of relationships, this gripping novel is a tour de force. Temporarily in Auckland while her husband is undergoing treatment, Sarah enjoys a walk in the coolness of the Symonds Street Cemetery. As she pauses at the grave of Emily Keeling, murdered in 1886 by a rejected suitor, a stranger named Hartley strikes up a conversation. Before long he arranges to meet Sarah for coffee. So their friendship begins, and soon blossoms into an affair, rich in mutual understanding and sexual excitement. But love may become obsession, which brings with it disquieting demands, even menace. ‘When love is not madness, it is not love.’

Pearly Gates

Pearly Gates
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 014377316X

This entertaining and insightful novel both skewers and celebrates small-town New Zealand. Pat `Pearly' Gates has achieved a lot in his life and evinces considerable satisfaction in his achievements. He has a reputation as a former Otago rugby player and believes he would have been an All Black but for sporting injuries. He runs a successful real-estate agency in a provincial South Island town, of which he is the second-term mayor. Popular, happily married, well established, he cuts an impressive figure, especially in his own eyes. But will his pride and complacency come before a fall?

The Larnachs

The Larnachs
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1869794982

Based on a real love triangle, this fascinating novel is by one of New Zealand's most-loved respected authors. 'Dougie's story and mine is not told in the history of William Larnach. It is our private journey, and only we understand how it came about; only we know the fitness and the wonder of it.' William James Mudie Larnach's name resonates in New Zealand history - the politician and self-made man who built the famous 'castle' on Otago Peninsula. In 1891, after the death of his first two wives, he married the much younger Constance de Bathe Brandon. But the marriage that began with such happiness was to end in tragedy. The story of the growing relationship between Conny and William's younger son, Dougie, lies at the heart of Owen Marshall's subtle and compelling new novel. The socially restrictive world of late nineteenth-century Dunedin and Wellington springs vividly to life as Marshall traces the deepening love between stepmother and stepson, and the slow disintegration of the domineering yet vulnerable figure of Larnach himself. Can love ever really be its own world, free of morality and judgement and scandal? Moving, thought-provoking and superbly written, The Larnachs is a memorable piece of fiction from one of our wisest authors.

Drybread

Drybread
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1869790758

Rich and subtle, this is a compelling novel from one of New Zealand's finest writers. It is a moving study of love and disappointment, of the harm we do to each other, knowingly and unknowingly, of the power and significance of landscape in our lives. A graveyard is all that's left of the remote Central Otago settlement of Drybread, which miners, often hungry and disappointed, once searched for gold. It is to an old cottage nearby that Penny Maine-King flees with her young son, defying a Californian court order awarding custody of the child to her estranged husband. And seeking her in this austere, burnt country is journalist Theo Esler. He is after a story, but he discovers something far more personal and significant.

Harlequin Rex

Harlequin Rex
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1869796810

An intriguing novel revolving around the varied reactions to a new, catastrophic disease. With the advent of the new millennium comes a new disease - Harlequin Rex - and a variety of reactions to it. The men and women in this intriguing novel find themselves caught up in a terrifying novelty, and all must cope as best they can. Their response is influenced as much by the past as by present events, however, those formative things that lie far back in us all: guilt, loyalty, compromise and love - especially love. Harlequin Rex won the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction.

Landmarks

Landmarks
Author: Owen Marshall
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0143774220

A handsome, landmark book celebrating the work of three of our literary and artistic heavyweights. The complementary work of artist Grahame Sydney, fiction writer Owen Marshall and poet Brian Turner was first brought together in the hugely successful Timeless Land in 1995. Its pages showed their shared, deep connection to Central Otago, to its vast skies, its wide plains punctuated by jagged ranges, its unique colours and its dwarfing effect on the people who pass through it. Twenty-five years later, this lavish new volume from these three long-time friends showcases a rich selection of their subsequent work, including recently written, previously unpublished pieces. Through their own marks about the land and its people, be it in ink or paint, they offer a love song to the South Island, in particular Central Otago.

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.