From Suffrage to a Seat in the House
The path to parliament for New Zealand women
Jenny Coleman
The history of women striving to share in governing the country, a neglected footnote in the nation’s electoral history, is now captured in this essential work by Jenny Coleman. She has drawn on a wide range of sources to create a rich portrayal of a rapidly evolving colonial society in which new ideas and social change were in constant friction with the status quo.
Landfall 239
Edited by Emma Neale
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, biographical and critical essays and cultural commentary. Landfall 239 announces the winners of the 2020 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition.
Kalimpong Kids
The New Zealand story, in pictures
Jane McCabe
In the early 20th century, 130 young Anglo-Indians were sent to New Zealand in an organised migration scheme from Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district of India. They were the mixed-race children of British tea planters and local women, and were placed as workers with New Zealand families from the Far North to Southland. Jane McCabe here tells this compelling and little-known New Zealand story, in pictures.
Every Now and Then I Have Another Child
Diane Brown
A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker ... are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown’s tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality.
The Lifers
Michael Steven
From Sean Macgregor’s lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven’s second collection presents his clear, clean vision of ‘the lifers’ who inhabit these islands and beyond.
Steven’s writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.
This is your real name
Elizabeth Morton
In lieu of flowers, bring weeds. Elizabeth Morton’s poems look unflinchingly at a raw and unstable world – the crash, the aftermath, the comeback, ‘the black heat at the centre of things’. The poems in Morton’s second collection are charged with a visceral energy. This is poetry as incantation: an intense, larger-than-life, tactile experience.
The General and the Nightingale
Dan Davin’s War Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
Dan Davin was the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin’s 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as ‘a wartime scholar-soldier’ and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies.
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The Gorse Blooms Pale
Dan Davin’s Southland Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
Dan Davin, one of New Zealand’s acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1913. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family in Southland.
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Politics in the Playground
The world of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand
Helen May
Freshly updated in 2019, the third edition of Politics in the Playground: The world of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand is a lively history of early childhood education and care in Aotearoa New Zealand in the postwar era. The book follows on from Discovery of Early Childhood (1997, 2013), which traced the origins of institutional care and education for young children in Europe, US and New Zealand prior to state interest and serious investment.
This latest edition brings the story right up to date with developments under the Labour coalition government of Jacinda Ardern.
