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Brave, explosive, and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir. 'It's material, make a story out of it,' was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her literary family. But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine the reality of that material.... The more she delved into her memories, the more the real characters in her life seemed to object. So what was the truth of 'a whole life lived in fiction'? This is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead. It looks beyond the public face to the 'messy reality of family life - and much more'.
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We live by the sea, which hems and stitches the scalloped edges of the land.' Renowned writer Patricia Grace begins her remarkable memoirs beside her beloved Hongoeka Bay. It is the place she has returned to throughout her life, and fought for, one of many battles she has faced- ...'It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl . . . I found that being different meant that I could be blamed . . .' As she shows, her experiences - good and bad, joyous and insightful - have fuelled what became a focus of her life- 'I had made up my mind that writing was something I would always do.
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By Stead, C. K.
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- RRP: $49.99
- $42.49
- Save $7.50
- Pub Date
13 May 21
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The third and final volume of C. K. Stead's memoirs, from leaving the University of Auckland to write full-time until today.
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Through his fiction, non-fiction and international journalism, Maurice Shadbolt played a leading role in projecting New Zealand to the world throughout the second half of the 20th century. In Volume Two Philip Temple tells of Shadbolt's epic coverage of the W.B. Sutch spy trial, ...his journalistic probes into the Arthur Allan Thomas case and the Erebus disaster, and his involvement in protests against the 1981 Springbok rugby tour. He tells of Shadbolt's demolition of the myths surrounding the Gallipoli campaign with his ground-breaking play Once on Chunuk Bair and subsequent documentary work. He tells of Shadbolt's growing stature as a novelist which produced such works as the unique The Lovelock Version and culminated in his New Zealand Wars trilogy, begun with the now New Zealand classic, Season of the Jew. Philip Temple also concludes the story of Shadbolt's fraught personal life as, by the end, he had been married four times and been involved in many affairs. It is a fascinating but ultimately tragic story about a man who had become New Zealand's most well-known and controversial author.
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By Morton, Rick
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- RRP: $37.99
- $28.49
- Save $9.50
- In Stock At Publisher
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This is a book about love. In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him ...the most during childhood didn't. So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It's a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can't live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can. As he says: 'People think they want cars, and they will, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God's sake, is love.' Praise for A Hundred Years of Dirt 'Morton mines questions that most of us feel too exhausted even to glance at. How did we get to be ourselves, and is it possible to change? And how can we begin to understand others who might seem like aliens? Morton is fresh...He's brilliant.' Helen Elliott, The Monthly 'Dark and provocative ... it's a reminder that this is a funny book and its author is a funny man. As Geordie Williamson notes in his review on this page, that sense of humour lifts this book above and beyond what it could have been: a human tragedy. It still is that. It's one of the saddest books I have read in a while, and one of the most honest .... I think this book should be read by every Australian.' Stephen Romei, The Australian 'Morton is a crack storyteller and his words and stories are infused with genuine compassion.' Christos Tsiolkas
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How Britain's most famous female poet invented herself and defied her times.
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The miracle is, perhaps, that I am still here - that I continue - and that despite all that's come before, I believe my life to be good. That is the truth hidden under all of this: that I am deeply happy to be alive. Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West M...idlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with a debilitating combination of illnesses and disability. Her days are watchful, restricted and often solitary, lived out in the same circumscribed hundred metres around her home. But Josie's world is vibrant, vivid, intricate, dynamic; her small universe teems with wonder, because she has learned what to look for. The patterns of ice on a frozen puddle; the small acts of kindness between her friends at the community centre; the birds in flight at sunset; the slow changes in the morning light, in her small garden, in her growing son. In January 2018, Josie sets out to tell the story of her still life, over the course of a year. As the seasons shift, and the tides of her illness draw in and out, Josie unfurls her history: her childhood bright with promise but shadowed by illness; her painful adolescence and her hopeful coming of age; the struggle of her marriage, and the triumph of motherhood. And then a most unexpected thing happens in Josie's quiet, ordered world: she falls in love. A Still Life is a story of illness and pain that rarely sees the light: illness and pain with no end or resolution; illness and pain that we must meet with courage, ingenuity, imagination and hope. Against a world which values progress and productivity above all else, Josie sets out a quietly radical alternative: to value and treasure life for life itself, with all its great and small miracles.
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A vibrant portrait of the acclaimed author Patricia Highsmith, publishing to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth in 1921.
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The definitive, authorised biography of Lee Child
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'Easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country' Max Porter Sleep. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw cl...arity about life itself.
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