woa bookshelf

Hunting Blind
Paddy Richardson
On a perfect summer's day, at a school picnic beside a lake, a little girl goes missing, leaving a family devastated and a community asking questions.

Seventeen years later her sister, Stephanie, is practising as a psychiatrist. A new patient's revelations force her to re-examine her sister's disappearance. Why are their stories so similar?

Unable to let the matter rest, Stephanie embarks on a journey to find out what happened to her sister.
 

Leading the Way: How New Zealand women won the vote
Megan Hutching
In 1893, wearing white camellias meant you supported women’s right to vote — a red camellia in your lapel signalled the opposite.

On 19 September 1893 New Zealand women won the vote. We were the first country in the world where women could vote in parliamentary elections but it took a drawn-out and often bitter struggle. The fortitude and strength of the women involved were sorely tested, as their determination to have equality and the right to vote brought out the worst in their opponents. Some of them resorted to cheating and lying and had opinions such as higher education is deleterious to women’s brains, and riding bicycles deleterious to women’s health and their reproductive ability.

Acclaimed author and respected historian, Megan Hutching tells the story of this momentous event and gives us a look into the lives of the women and men who fought the system and brought about this massive social upheaval, by changing the minds and hearts of the politicians. Megan remembers her surprise and pride when she discovered that some of her Hutching relatives from Woodville had signed the suffrage petition. The discovery immediately connected her to the campaign in a very personal way. I loved writing Leading the Way because the campaign for New Zealand women to have the right to vote is such a good story. There are heroes – and many heroines – and villains, cliffhanger situations and a colourful supporting cast. Piecing together the story of the campaign, and of the 1893 election, was fascinating, especially the research into the biographies: Kate Sheppard was a remarkable woman, Margaret Sievwright was lovely and gentle but as staunch as they come, and Henry Fish was famously opposed to women having the right to vote.

Among the biographies are familiar names while others will be less well known. Their stories are an important part of our history as a socially progressive country, and their courage, loyalty and fierce belief in democracy still resonate today. There has been an enormous arc of progress in New Zealand since 1893 but it took a long time for women to be given the right to stand for parliament, and many more years before one was elected. Even today, reported comments about women who hold prominent public position concentrate on their gender rather than their abilities, so we still have a way to go before women and men have equal rights in the way that Kate Sheppard and her sister suffragists desired.

Russian at Heart: Sonechka’s Story - A memoir
Olga & John Hawkes
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 shattered the lives of all Russians. This is the story of one such family in an era made famous in the novel and film, Dr Zhivago.
Sonechka Balk was born into the gentry in the Crimea in 1904. She is the youngest of four children. World War 1 and the revolution tear her family apart; relationships are destroyed by events beyond her control. An orphaned teenager, Sonechka is forced to work for Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, counting bodies of those who have died of starvation and those murdered by the Bolsheviks.
After many narrow escapes and chased by the Cheka, Sonechka flees on the Trans-Siberian railway to China. Her dream is to go to America to join Sasha, her White Army officer brother. This is shattered by new US immigration restrictions passed in 1924. She is stranded in Shanghai, the world’s most cosmopolitan city between the wars. Several people help her, including Duncan Kerr and Lara von Schneider. Sasha had saved the life of Duncan’s brother, a British officer, when they were fighting the Red Army in Siberia. Sonechka’s future husband, Vladimir Rossi, a multi-lingual ex-Imperial Horse Guards officer, arrives in Shanghai in 1929. Badly wounded towards the end of the Civil War, he was evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople (Istanbul). He had attended the elite Corps des Pages military academy in St Petersburg. In 1913. During the Romanov dynasty’s tercentenary celebrations, he was an equerry to Tsar Nicholas' daughter, the Grand Duchess Princess Tatyana. Sonechka and Vladimir meet and marry in Shanghai where they raise their family. Their remarkable resourcefulness enables them to survive in this war-torn city during the 1930s and, in particular, the Japanese occupation during World War II. The rich storehouse of stories that Olga heard from Sonechka, her mother, and Dora, her aunt, along with their memoirs form the basis of this book. It is a unique account of how a family survived some of the twentieth century’s greatest upheavals

We Are All Made of Glue
Marina Lewycka
From bonding to bondage, from B&Q to Belarus, along with seven smelly cats, three useless handymen, two slimy estate agents, social workers, a bonker lady. The story of a very unlikely friendship.

Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out; her sixteen-year-old son is busy surfing born-again websites; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting her down.
So when
Georgie spots Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour with an eye for a bargain and a fondness for matchmaking, rummaging through her skip in the middle of the night, it's just the distraction she needs. And although they mistrust each other at first - Georgie doesn't like the look of that past-its-sell-by-date fish, while Mrs Shapiro thinks Georgie needs to smarten herself up and grab a new husband - a firm friendship is formed over the reduced-price shelf at the supermarket.

Then Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital and to Georgie's surprise, she is named as her next of kin. But sorting out Mrs Shapiro's semi-derelict mansion in Highbury, home to seven stinky cats with agendas of their own, is no easy job when the handyman called in to change the locks turns out to be not what he seems and his two assistants, 'the Uselesses', are doing more breaking than fixing.
And what about the two slimy estate agents (one with a charming taste for bondage) who start competing to trick Mrs Shapiro into selling her rickety old house, or the social worker determined to commit her to a nursing home? As Georgie steps in to help her new friend, she finds herself unravelling a mystery which takes her from Highbury to wartime Europe to the Middle East, and learning a bit about DIY along the way.

The Undone Years
Jenny Haworth
The Great War, the war to end all wars, has recently ended. Caroline Allen, a young fine arts student, senses a chance of freedom, of escape from the rigid expectations of her family. While nursing her mother, who is ill with Spanish Flu, she is invited by a friend, Judy Wilson, to travel to Paris. Judy’s father is part of the New Zealand delegation to the 1919 Peace Conference.
For Caroline it is a chance to explore European art, to see the originals of so many paintings she has studied only as black and white reproductions. Her friend Judy, however, is interested only in finding a ‘suitable’ husband. While in Paris Caroline meets Ashley Carrick-Jones, an army officer and a journalist with a “past” and an enigmatic role in the new Europe. His job takes him to the defeated cities – Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. Circumstances force Caroline to follow him.Set in the six months following World War I, a period of upheaval in Europe, The Undone Years is the story of those times. Many hope for new beginnings, for freedom from the horror of fighting; but no one is free of those “undone years” – they cast a long shadow. Fears have been created and people have emerged from the trenches with very different moral codes.The novel shows the differences in Europe – celebrations in Paris compared with the grim fight for survival in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. It also touches on the dilemma of how to make a just peace amidst the cries for vengeance; how to secure a future for Europe that would save it from further horrendous conflicts.

The novel compares the destructiveness of war with the creativity of the artist. Through it runs the story of Caroline and her development as a woman.

Employment Bites: The bite-sized guide to better human resources with up-to-date examples for New Zealand companies
Angela Atkins
Angela Atkins is an experienced human resources (HR) and training manager and has learnt some hard lessons about what makes a great HR person and great HR practices. She wrote Employment Bites so you don’t make the same mistakes she made and can learn from her experience and that of other HR people who shared their stories with her.
Over Angela’s 13 years in HR she’s learnt that for HR to be practical and useful you have to design processes that address the needs of the organisation, and you work WITH managers, involve them and get them to agree, so the processes actually work.
Using practical examples of real-life human resources solutions from New Zealand companies, Employment Bites shows you how to work with managers and employees in every area of employment to make the company more effective and a great place to work.
Employment Bites is split into 23 easy-to-manage bite-sized chunks, each one dealing with one particular area of HR. Each bite talks about how HR can add value in that area as well as giving you lots of useful examples on how to do this and how to develop your human resources skills.
Employment Bites is for anyone who works with employment issues or responsibilities. If you’re an HR manager, HR adviser, PA, line manager or small-business owner, take your first bite today!
Angela has held HR roles within universities, finance companies, banks, national retail chains and contact centres. In July 2007 she co-founded Elephant HR and Training, www.elephanttraining.co.nz and she works part-time as an HR manager for small to medium-sized business enterprises alongside designing and facilitating training. Angela lives in Auckland and is the author of Management Bites.