Books published by Victoria University Press

It's 1994. Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches.

Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter. 'Chloe Lane's The Swimmers is by turns touching, reson...ate, fiercely candid, and beautifully written. In this novel about a daughter's attempt to help her mother receive a merciful death, Lane has sidestepped the cliches, and captured the enigma of what it means to save a life by ending one.'
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This book is the first to represent the full extent of the work of James Brown. With personal lyrics, narrative desire, short takes, anti-poetry, stolen lines, and hill-climbing, Selected Poems is a showcase of one of New Zealand's essential poetic voices. 'James Brown is the... New Zealand poet laureate of torpor, resignation and exhaustion ... with intermittent bouts of fanatical bicycle riding. The miracle is that he can make it all so interesting and darkly humorous and weirdly moving.' -Gregory O'Brien 'This is not a poetry book for the faint-hearted.' -Pania Brown (James's sister) 'The finding of poetry in unlikely places expands our concept of what poetry is - if a poem can be found in the heart of an ATM, where can it not be found?' -Gabe Atkinson
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The enigmatic figure of John Mulgan remains a striking presence in New Zealand culture, his sole novel, Man Alone (1939), one of the classic landmarks of a mature and independent New Zealand literature. His second book, Report on Experience, published posthumously in 1947, is one... of the most clear-sighted and moving memoirs to emerge from the Second World War. A Good Mail presents a generous selection of his letters home - letters to those he cared about, but from whom he felt a permanent separation. When he left New Zealand in 1933, he had declared I think I'm going to have the best year of my life . That confident expectation carried him through the first half of the thirties, but the growing political unrest in Europe severely dampened his enthusiasm ( It's a hell of a world we live in ), made him more and more conscious of his separation from whatever 'home' had come to mean, and strengthened his desire to see again his parents, his wife, and the son he scarcely knew. It was a desire that remained unfulfilled, his life ended by his own hand. These letters tell his story.
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"This delightful collection of linked short stories focuses on Philip Fetch, a lawyer with an office in a suburban shopping mall who feels increasingly out of step with his society and neighbours. At once surreal and whimsical, and fired by a quietly burning moral engagement, The... Invisible Rider is an antipodean cousin of Calvino's Marcovaldo"--Publisher's website.
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