Shortlisted for NZ Booklovers Awards 2020 In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling Lido where his father is a lifeguard. He idolises his father - never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man - and he comes to believe that heroism is all. The arrest of his sister Lilly later that summer brings the halcyon days to an abrupt end, and his family is torn apart, with Lilly sent to jail and the boy set to a boarding house for dysfunctional boys, far away from his home - The Fell. He is young and afraid but the boys in the home become his family and they band together against their enemies, both real and imagined, they become family. The boy is an unreliable narrator, seeing the world and his place in it through a unique lens. He meets ghosts, hears voices and battles his fears but never questions his own version of reality. Anger spills over when he hears the girl he loves referred to as a twenty-dollar-whore and his actions lead him to run from The Fell. And run, And run...

Bind: paperback

Pages: 325

Dimensions: 126 x 198 mm

It's 1960, and pregnant with her lover's child, Heather Fontwell makes a plan to visit her husband William at the tea plantation he manages in Kenya. She books passage on the SS Uganda, hoping to convince him that the baby is his. In Kenya, William is distracted by news of financial misconduct at the plantation, something he suspects may be down to Mombasa harbourmaster Carruthers – currently on the SS Uganda making his way back to Kenya... During her journey, Heather meets resistance, travelling as a single woman, particularly from the unpleasant Carruthers. The morning sickness she is hiding leads her to rely more and more on the thaliadomide tablets that the ship matron is handing out like sweets. When events take a tragic turn,William arrives at the port in Mombasa to find no wife and a captain and crew who seem to be hiding the truth...

Bind: hardback

Pages: 336

Dimensions: 129 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 21-05-2020

"The work of a poet who knows how important people and places are… I kept thinking, too, about life’s voyagings. I found the whole very affecting — touching, tender, rueful at times… And all the more impressive for being unsentimental." - Brian Turner We are unmoored by circumstances that set us adrift from our normal lives into unknown waters. The poems in this debut collection range from the luxury of certainty, through the loss of a partner, to establishing a new life in a different part of the country. But nothing is secure, and a global pandemic again threatens to disrupt the familiar. Through it all, there is reassurance in recognising the perfection in arising and passing away. About the author: Bridget Auchmuty was born in Britain in 1951, came to New Zealand to visit her sister, and never went home. She spent more than thirty years in the Nelson region, where she and her partner lived on ten acres in the Motueka Valley. After his death, she shifted to the Ida Valley in Central Otago, where she lives in a yurt. The core of this collection formed one component of the author’s Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Massey University, and several of the poems have appeared in prominent poetry journals.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 88

Dimensions: 160 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 01-10-2020

A grand piano falls off a crane and by bad luck ends up the responsibility of Stefan ‒ piano restorer, illegal immigrant and victim of immigration fraudsters. His neighbours, a diverse bunch with their own messy lives, weigh in to help him rebuild it. The Score mines the rich world of the inner city – a block of council flats where migrants and misfits create their own community.

Bind: paperback

For Carla, February means the pressure of another birthday party for Nathan and his wealthy New York art world friends. She buys him a book about Kurt Schwitters, an artist he is thinking of collecting, but a chance encounter with a man in the bookstore changes everything. Patrick, an environmental filmmaker, challenges her relationship and her artistic ambition. In the wake of their fierce attraction, the unscrupulous world that has seduced Carla begins to unravel and the harder she tries to break free the tighter Nathan’s grip becomes. Art and illusion, possession and freedom are the heady components of Janet Colson’s psychological drama, The Shark Party.

Bind: paperback

A wedding, a poem, a shortcut home – what happens next will shake Thomas Odishu, wife Esther and children Ramina and George to the core. For this is Iraq in 1991 and there are no such things as coincidences. Informants are everywhere and once you’ve had a run-in with Saddam’s regime, your only chance of survival is escape. But no matter how hard you run, the past is always there, right behind you. Set in Iraq and England over three decades, Run Thomas Run is the gripping story of a father’s contorted love, a daughter’s coming of age, guilt, redemption and a child’s promise made forty years earlier that should never have been kept.

Bind: paperback

Fifteen-year-old Jackson Ryder has always loved art, but in the wake of his mother’s death, he must choose between his passion and his grieving father’s approval. Pulled from his New York home and thrust into the melting pot that is San Sebastiano, California in the 1960s, Jackson finds himself embroiled in an era of assassination, an emerging art scene, the Civil Rights Movement and The Beatles. As he learns how to deal with life, death and a new found interest in girls, drawing is the only thing stopping his world from spinning out of control.

Bind: paperback

A Line of Sight is a compelling whodunnit woven through a story community, family and an extraordinary eight-year-old boy. When Nick and Graeme set out rabbit shooting one August day neither of them realise their lives are about to change forever. They spot a couple of suspected cannabis growers on their land. Each fires in warning and one grower is killed. But who fired the fatal shot? And how far will each man go to prove himself not guilty? The story of a young man facing the biggest dilemma of his life, A Line of Sight is an affecting portrayal of male friendship, the links between generations, and Swan – a blind boy whose strange take on the events brings great danger and unexpected clarity.

Bind: paperback

Holly moved to Brighton to escape her grief over the death of her boyfriend, Sam. But now she is here, sitting on a bench, listening to the sea sway... what is supposed to happen next? The solitude she had so craved leaves her feeling wrecked. Stranded. But after she meets Frank, the tide begins to shi . Frank, a retired magician who has experienced his own loss but manages to be there for everyone else. Gradually, as he introduces Holly to a circle of new friends, young and old, all with their own stories of love and grief to share, she begins to learn to live again. A moving and powerful debut, Let Me Be Like Water is a book simultaneously about nothing and everything: about the humdrum yet extraordinariness of everyday life; of lost and new connections; of loneliness and friendship.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 150 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 10-05-2018

Selected in the Listener 100 Best Books of 2018! A novel about food, whānau, and mental illness. Valerie reads George Eliot to get to sleep – just to take her mind off worries over her patients, her children, their father and the next family dinner. Elena is so obsessed with health, traditional food, her pregnancy and her blog she doesn’t notice that her partner, Malcolm the ethicist, is getting himself into a moral dilemma of his own making. Evie wants to save the world one chicken at a time. Meanwhile her boyfriend, Michael is on a quest to reconnect with his Māori heritage and discover his own identity. Rosa is eight years old and lost in her own fantasy world, but she’s the only one who can tell something’s not right. Crisis has the power to bring this family together, but will it be too late? "An accomplished story of a family in crisis - Ritchie's great skill is her ability to conjure the inner lives if her characters. Fishing For Maui is a compassionate meditation on what it means to be well". - Sarah Jane Barnett

Bind: paperback

Pages: 366

Dimensions: 152 x 229 x 20 mm

Publication Date: 05-07-2018