First published as a special issue of Robin Dudding' s literary magazine Islands (Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 1976), Dick Seddon' s Great Dive won the 1977 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and was republished in The Shirt Factory and other stories by VUP in 1981.Dick Seddon' s Great Dive traces the story of a love affair through 1970s New Zealand counterculture, traveling between the poles of Bethells Beach and Port Chalmers. Parties and drugs fill daily life, while the land' s true history and the dispossession of its original owners press the story to its tragic conclusion.

Pregnant after rape, seventeen-year-old Josephina Hansen is exiled from her family home in Kiel in the north of Germany. She finds refuge with her sister's Danish family in Sønderborg, then in Hamburg with a philanthropic businessman and, later, a radical journalist and his sister. In 1880 the worsening political situation forces this makeshift family into exile – and a new life in a small farming settlement in the Kaitieke valley in New Zealand.Accompanying Josephina on the journey is an ancient sewing sampler given to her by her grandmother. In its lovingly stitched pictures she finds a way of mapping the world she has come from – and that is traversed by the birds of her childhood, the Rohrsänger or reed warblers, which migrate yearly from the salt marshes near her home to ‘somewhere nice and warm where the oranges grow'.Josephina's story is framed by the reunion of Frank and Beth, descendants of two of her three children by...

From early childhood in postwar Blenheim to the remote regions of Bangladesh, from an English boarding school to 1960s Auckland, and from Jordan during the civil war of 1969–70 to family homes full of children, this dazzling book traces the many shifts in Ian Wedde's life. Haunted by the ghosts of his restless German and Scottish great grandparents, and of his wandering parents, Wedde is always looking over his shoulder as he writes. His companion throughout is his twin brother Dave, who shared their first home—their mother Linda's womb—and who, as the book ends, hosts a lunch where the brothers raise their glasses to the transit lounges of their lives. Affectionate, funny, sad, analytical, but above all honest, The Grass Catcher is at once a moving personal memoir and an engaging and reflective essay on the nature of memory.

The Age of Excess has been good to Christopher Hare. One of the world?s top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, with the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as Thé Glacé. But, in the new mood of austerity ushered in by the credit crunch, will the world still be interested in what he thinks of Robuchon?s caramelised quail? Certainly Christopher?s editor isn?t. Christopher?s moment of truth catches up with him in the corrupt space between the violent Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 and the luxurious bolt-holes of the Riviera. One evening, almost at the bottom of his over-the-hill slope, he is investigating the budget options in a mediocre restaurant in off-season Nice. These days he is no longer accompanied by Thé Glacé, aka Mary Pepper, who has found international fame and fortune as an art photographer of pornographically eroticised foodstuffs. In the restaurant, Christopher witnesses an...

Trifecta looks at the odds in the lives of the three children of Martin and Agnes Klepka. Martin was one of the refugees of Nazism who famously brought Modernist architecture and 'real coffee' to New Zealand. Many years after his early death from a heart attack, Klepka's children are struggling in their different ways with the difficult legacy of their charismatic, overbearing father. Sandy, who was disliked by his father, is a cultural historian in the twilight of his career, disgraced, divorced and reduced to a .2 position at Auckland University. Veronica, who bored her father, is struggling with a failing art deco Napier tour company and an alcoholic husband. And Mick, Martin Klepka's favorite, a gambling, methamphetamine and sex addict, is still living alone in the Red House, his father's plagiarized masterpiece.