This collection offers 40 new poems from popular poet Apirana Taylor. Inspired by nature and mythology, he shifts his focus from the mundane to the mysterious, and with characteristic wit and intensity shares his delight and despair in what he discovers. Accessible and tender, but pulling no punches, his work assumes many forms and has been included in New Zealand schools' English curriculum.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 56

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 30-09-2014

BESTSELLER The novel A Gallipoli Soldier’s Secret is the story of a New Zealand woman’s pilgrimage to Turkey to discover the truth about her great-grandfather’s fate - a Gallipoli soldier who never returned home. During her search she stumbles over dark secrets which have been hidden in a Turkish village for decades. They are so sensitive that disclosure threatens embarrassment for villagers and two old foes -New Zealand and Turkey.
Lyrically written, A Gallipoli Soldier’s Secret paints an informative picture of life in a Turkish village, Turkish culture and history, and the suffering and annihilation Turks endured in WWI. It follows the war through the stories of two soldiers – New Zealander Alistair John Taylor and Turk Ali Osman. Their lives converge with unexpected consequences.
A Gallipoli Soldier’s Secret is unique in that it provides a glimpse of the war from a Turkish perspective. It also vividly reveals village life and a journey of inner conflict and self-discovery.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 300

Dimensions: 135 x 216 x 40 mm

Publication Date: 10-02-2015

Charles Brasch (1909–1973) was the founder and first editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s premier journal of literature and ideas. Born in Dunedin, he grew up to be at home in the literature, art and architecture of Europe, but returned to devote his life to the arts in his own country – as editor, critic, collector and patron. Brasch’s vocation, however, was to be a poet. As he said in his memoir Indirections, in writing poems he ‘discovered New Zealand … because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language.’ This selection shows his journey of discovery, as Charles Brasch learned by reading poets such as Rilke, W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves to find his own voice as ‘a citizen of the English language’. It is presented as a beautifully bound cased edition

Bind: hardback

Pages: 152

Publication Date: 30-01-2015

The Conch Trumpet calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen close, critically and ‘in alert reverie’. David Eggleton’s reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world – the thisness of things: Cloud whispers brush daylight’s ear; fern question-marks form a bush encore; forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. – from ‘Nor-wester Flying’ In this latest collection David Eggleton is court jester/philosopher/lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud

Bind: paperback

Pages: 124

Dimensions: 170 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 20-02-2015

"There Are No Horses In Heaven" is a warm, delightful collection from poet Frankie McMillan, full of vivid phrasing, eerie moments, and a colourful cast of characters. Readers will keep recalling and revisiting these poems: they tingle with the same sense of the ineffable, like certain chords in musical pieces. Gorgeous, haunting and beautifully strange, they seem to have a ripple effect. One poem causes another, they glint and glance off each other depicting a world of real emotion and psychological mystery: how strange we are to ourselves and to each other, even when we have such depth of feeling for each other. "There Are No Horses In Heaven" has been designed and printed in a limited edition in collaboration with Ilam Press, Ilam School of Fine Arts. Original artwork for cover design by Lyttelton artist Nichola Shanley.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 102

Dimensions: 125 x 200 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2015

Dunedin poet Iain Lonie (1932–1988), a Cambridge scholar who enjoyed an international reputation as a medical historian, died before his poetry was fully appreciated. He published five slim volumes but his style was not the one that dominated New Zealand poetry at the time. And yet, argues Damian Love in an essay in this volume, ‘To read him now is, for most of us, practically to discover a new resource.’ This collection, assembled from sources public and private, is the result of poet David Howard’s determination to rescue a memorable body of work from oblivion. As well as the poems from Lonie’s published volumes, it includes over a hundred unpublished works, two essays and an extensive commentary. While his keen interest in mortality was focused by the premature death of his wife Judith (aged 46), Lonie’s poetry is also an attempt to recover the loved in us all. As he eavesdrops on desire and grief he reports back, often wittily, leaving the most poised body of elegiac poetry New Zealand has. For younger poets, Iain Lonie’s poetry has become ‘a place to go on from’

Bind: hardback

Pages: 392

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 20-05-2015

Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of her ‘Urewera Notebook’ during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her life at the time, and her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a 19-year-old still living in the colony. This publication is the first scholarly edition of the ‘Urewera Notebook’. It provides an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield’s happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 128

Dimensions: 156 x 234 mm

Publication Date: 20-06-2015

Mary Cresswell is at her imaginative best in this new collection, built from her experiments with the ghazal, a traditional form, which she first met via the work of Agha Shahid Ali and Mimi Khalvati. The poems in ‘Fish Stories’ are presented as an intellectual challenge to students of the ghazal and glosa forms, encouraging them to develop their own craft. At the same time, Cresswell’s poetry is widely accessible and appealing: using rhyme and varying poetic structures, inspired by a range of topics, but especially by nature and ecology, she combines humour with serious comment to engage and connect with her reader.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 132

Dimensions: 140 x 200 mm

Publication Date: 20-05-2015

A Better Place told of life in and around Greytown, in the Wairarapa Valley, in the 1860s when a young Englishman John Johnson came to New Zealand hoping to farm his own land. Greytown was the first inland town in New Zealand and the Small Farms’ Association made it possible for immigrants with few means, like the Johnsons to buy land. After two years John was joined by his wife Kate and son Jake, aged ten, and nine-year-old daughter Cathy. Kate came from a wealthier background, but she worked alongside her husband, milking cows and growing food in their garden. In Changing Fortunes, set in the 1870s, the family has become an important part of the community, sharing the good and the challenging times with the other settlers, their children growing up and beginning to make their own lives.

Bind: paperback

Dimensions: 160 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 16-04-2016

Long-listed for Ngaio Marsh Best Novel 2018 Their Taonga: Ngai Tahu’s ancient and sacred treasure. Everybody covets it. When it is stolen, the ancestors start wreaking havoc. The curse destroys people’s lives. Boats are overturned, babies die at birth, throats are slit. It must be returned to appease the ancestors. It has drawn Countess Margarita Szechnyi and Boyland the Collector, otherwise known as the Butcher of Warsaw, together into a web of murder, intrigue, love and deceit. Inspector O’Rorke is pushed into the case, along with his good friend Colonel Henry Jamieson and Henare Greaves as they attempt to return the Taonga to its rightful place. Starting in the secret caves of Murihiku in New Zealand’s South Island in 1883, then travelling to South America, on to London, then over to the Greek Isles, this book keeps the reader intrigued right through to the gripping climax. This is the sixth in Edmund Bohan’s gripping series of Inspector O’Rorke novels.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 200

Dimensions: 152 x 234 mm

Publication Date: 15-05-2017