Fiction & Literature > NZ classics

As a young man in the 1930s, Josef battled the Nazis on the streets of Vienna. He fled to New Zealand, only to be interned as a dangerous enemy on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour. After the war, he rebuilt his life and married Nancy. Despite his success, Josef still stands askew from his times. In his chosen home he is both an insider and an outsider, and the past has become a place in which to escape and perhaps even to resolve the troubles of the present.

In 1905 a motley group of young New Zealand rugby players sets out by steamer on a journey to the other side of the world. Their exploits on the field of play as they move through the British Isles are staggering. Then the following year they are back, accorded a hero's welcome, the likes of which has never been seen in their country before. Their fame has spread before them across three continents. Winner of the 2001 Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana Awards. First published 2001.

Maurice Gee's acclaimed novel Plumb was the winner of the Wattie Book Award and the New Zealand Fiction Award. His brilliant picture of the intolerant, irascible clergyman George Plumb is regarded as one of the very finest New Zealand novels.

Widely acclaimed when first published, Maurice Gee's Blindsight is now regarded as one of the master's finest novels and one of the best novels published in New Zealand in the past couple of decades. Reviewer Dennis Welch suggests it may be Gee's best work of fiction since the highly regarded Plumb. Gee's complex but knowing portrait of siblings who were once close but are now completely estranged as adults - and why, and what's being hidden - is a brilliantly executed novel.
Alice Ferry is a retired Wellington scientist. As ... read more

In the deceptively quiet Waikato of the 1930s and 1940s, a number of lives connect in a complex web of family ties, desire and violence. The events of this story also take in boxing, farming, devotion and perversion, ranging as far as Tasmania and the Spanish Civil War. Alex, tall and solitary, striding through this novel ...Barbara, his first love ...Bet, strong and unobtrusive ...And the enigmatic man in the balaclava.

First published in 1972, Pounamu Pounamu introduced an exciting new voice into New Zealand literature. Most of Witi Ihimaera's stories, based on the East Coast, describe a traditional rural, communal way of life facing huge pressures from the drift by many Maori to the cities. This was to be a constant theme in Ihimaera's future writing.

Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the vivid, impressionistic evocation of family life in 'At the Bay' to the poignant, haunting, miniature masterpiece 'The Garden Party'.

This novel was Barry Crump's sequel to the bestselling A Good Keen Man. The main character is Sam Cash, an engaging, yarn-spinning vagabond, who takes young Jack Lilburn under his wing on a roundabout journey. The pair drift from one job to another - forestry, horse-breaking, fencing, mustering, farming - but of equal importance to the story are the tall tales and unusual qualities of Sam Cash himself, hard-case humorist and jack-of-all-trades.

First published 1961.

Mutuwhenua is the story of Ripeka, who leaves her extended family and its traditional lifestyle to marry Graeme, a Pakeha schoolteacher. In the strange world of the city, Ripeka discovers that she cannot make the break from her whanau, that the old ways are too strong. The first novel by a Maori woman ever published, Mutuwhenua is a powerful, moving story of contrasts - between old and new, young and old, Maori and Pakeha.

In the foreground of All Visitor's Ashore is a set of bizarre characters, all of whom seem bent on escaping from New Zealand into a larger world. The 1951 waterfront lockout is on, the harbour is full of cargo vessels, but the passenger ships continue to sail. One by one or two by two the characters in the novel depart, leaving Curl Skidmore, the would-be poet and latterday professor (who is looking back on these events as an older man) alone on Takapuna Beach.