woa bookshelf
Island
Penelope Todd
Penelope Todd's first novel for adults is full of brilliantly drawn
characters and a narrative which sweeps the reader along with its power. This is
literary fiction of the highest quality, and an intensely romantic page-turner.
Indelible
Ink
Fiona McGregor
Marie King is fifty-nine, recently divorced, and has lived a rather conventional
life on Sydney’s affluent north shore. Now her three children have moved out,
the family home is to be sold, and with it will go her beloved garden.
On a drunken whim, Marie gets a tattoo — an act that gives way to an unexpected
friendship with her tattoo artist, Rhys. Before long, Rhys has introduced Marie
to a side of the city that clashes with her staid north-shore milieu. Her
children are mortified by their mother’s transformation, but have their own
challenges to deal with: workplace politics; love affairs old and new; and, of
course, the real-estate market.
Written with Fiona McGregor’s customary savage wit and keen eye, Indelible Ink
uses one family as a microcosm for the changes operating in society at large. In
its piercing examination of the way we live now, it is truly a novel for our
times.
MĀORI
ART AND DESIGN
Weaving, Painting, Carving and
Architecture
By Julie Paama-Pengelly
Band
of Gold
Deborah Challinor
HarperCollins bestselling New Zealand historical novelist, Deborah Challinor,
brings us the third instalment of the Kitty series, Band of Gold, set in the
land for which she is soon leaving us — Australia. In Kitty we were first
introduced to the tempestuous Kitty Carlisle when she was banished to the
colonies after being involved in a social scandal. There she meets dangerous and
unpredictable Rian Farrell, captain of the trading schooner Katipo. Four years
later in Amber, Kitty has married Rian and, after sailing the high seas, she
returns to New Zealand in 1845 at a pivotal moment in New Zealand history; the
signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. During this time, Kitty’s heart is captured
by a haunting young street urchin whom Kitty names Amber. Band of Gold is set in
1854, and Kitty, Amber, Rian and his trustworthy crew dock Katipo at Melbourne
harbour for an overhaul. While the ship is being serviced, they leave life on
the ocean for Ballarat to try their hand at gold mining, which results in a
horrific tragedy no one could have foreseen.
A future book in the Kitty series will see Rian and Kitty in Dunedin during the
gold- mining boom of the 1860s, and in that they need to be familiar with the
industry. What better place for them to have learned the highs and lows of the
life of a digger than 1850s Ballarat, the Australian town that was literally
built on gold?
So Much
For That
Lionel Shriver
Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retreat to the Third
World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway will be replaced with "talking, thinking, seeing, and being"—and
enough sleep. When he sells his home repair business for a cool million dollars,
his dream finally seems within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years,
has concocted endless excuses why it's never the right time to go. Weary of
working as a peon for the jerk who bought his company, Shep announces he's
leaving for a Tanzanian island, with or without her.
Just returned from a doctor's appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep
can't go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. But their
policy only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep's
nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain.
Enriched with three medical subplots that also explore the human costs of
American health care, So Much for That follows the profound
transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected
opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor. In defiance of her
dark subject matter, Shriver writes a page-turner that presses the question: How
much is one life worth?
Living
Language
Exploring Kiwi Talk
Elizabeth Gordon
Sociolinguist Elizabeth Gordon has been commenting on this and other matters of
linguistic debate in a weekly column in the Christchurch Press for the past two
years and is a regular contributor on WOA. This book is a compilation of those
100 columns, each one a fascinating reflection on our changing language.
Me and Dad flew home from Aushtralia on Ear New Zealand and there was nothink we
wanted more than fush'n'chups with youse guys . Is New Zealand English going to
hell in a handcart, or is it simply evolving into an increasingly distinctive
Kiwi form? Should we be seeking to hold on the old and claw back what we have
'lost', or should we learn to accept change and rejoice in something that is
uniquely our own? Sociolinguist Elizabeth Gordon has been commenting on this and
other matters of linguistic debate in a weekly column in the Christchurch Press
for the past two years. This book is a compilation of those 100 columns, each
one a fascinating reflection on our changing language.
Angel’s
Blood
Nalini Singh
Nalini Singh was born in Fiji and raised in New Zealand. She spent three years
living and working in Japan, and travelling around Asia before returning here –
although she's always plotting new trips. She has worked as a lawyer, a
librarian, a candy factory general hand, a bank temp and an English teacher, not
necessarily in that order. Nalini has written fifteen books, including the seven
novel psy‐changeling series, the two book Guild Hunter series (both of which are
ongoing) and a number of standalone titles. She’s also contributed to several
anthologies alongside authors like Charlaine Harris.
Guild Hunter Book 1: Angel’s Blood
Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux knows she's the best ‐ but she doesn't know if
she's good enough for this job. Hired by the dangerously beautiful Archangel
Raphael, a being so lethal that no mortal wants his attention, only one thing is
clear failure is not an option... even if the task she's been set is
impossible. Because this time, it's not a wayward vamp she has to track. It's an
archangel gone bad. The job will put Elena in the midst of a killing spree like
no other... and pull her to the razor's edge of passion. Even if the hunt
doesn't destroy her, succumbing to Raphael's seductive touch just may. Because
when archangels play, mortals break...
Into
the Wilderness
Mandy Hager
In Into the Wilderness, the second book in the Blood of the
Lamb trilogy, opens with Maryam, Ruth and Joseph having managed to flee
Onewére on an untested sailing craft — with Joseph’s troublesome cousin, Lazarus
hijacking their plans and joining them as well. Sailing into nothingness they
hope to find rescue and reprieve on Marawa Island. But when they finally arrive
at their planned destination the island appears to be solely populated by birds
. . . Perhaps the Apostle’s dire warnings about the fall-out of the Tribulation
were true after all? As Maryam and Joseph experience all the topsy-turvy
misunderstandings and sexual tension first love entails, the antagonism between
Maryam and Lazarus reaches explosive proportions. But when disaster brings the
crushing realisation that time is now against them, all four must decide just
who they can risk turning to for help . . .
Fast-paced, direct and powerful, this is the thrilling sequel to The Crossing which was recently shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Awards.
GINNY’S
HERB HANDBOOK
A guide for New Zealand & Australian herb lovers
GINNY CLAYTON
One of gardening’s greatest pleasures is growing herbs & using them fresh from
your garden. Ginny Clayton shows you how in this handbook for the modern herb
grower.
From culinary herbs such as Thai basil and French tarragon to herbs for healing,
including comfrey and chamomile, Ginny describes how to propagate, raise and
maintain over 60 herbs using organic growing methods. There are tips on how to
plan your kitchen herb garden, companion planting, which herbs to plant to
attract bees, and which ones repel insect pests. Also included are delicious
recipes using fresh culinary herbs that boost flavour and your health, and how
to make herb oils, butters and vinegars and relaxing and refreshing herbal teas.
Easy to use and full of great advice, this friendly guide to homegrown herbs is
all you need to get started on the road to a more herbal, and healthier,
lifestyle.
BRAVE
BESS
Susan Brocker
Many books have been written and stories told
about the brave New Zealand soldiers who fought and died in World War One. But
there is one story that is seldom told. It is the story of their brave horses.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, the New Zealand troops left for the battlefields
with more than 3,700 horses. The horses were the first of over 10,000 that New
Zealand sent to war between 1914 and 1916, serving mainly with the Mounted
Rifles Brigade in the Middle East. They faced heat, stress, thirst, hunger,
exhaustion, disease, and ultimately, death. Yet these noble creatures served our
troopers with unquestioning courage and loyalty until the very end. Of all the
horses that departed at the start of the war, only one ever returned home. BRAVE
BESS AND THE ANZAC HORSES is her story.
Bess returned from war to live out her final days near Bulls and her grave and
memorial is only a few kilometres from the township. This humble memorial to
Bess is the only recognition of the contribution made by New Zealand horses in
the war effort. In recent years on early ANZAC Day mornings, soldiers gather
beside the memorial, some on horseback, to honour the life of Bess and the
horses of World War One.
Susan Brocker researched extensively the history of the New Zealand Mounted
Rifles in the Middle East campaign of World War One. She also read the many
diaries, memoirs, and letters of troopers from the New Zealand Mounted Rifles
and the Australian Light Horse. Although it was a tragic story to explore, it
was also a very poignant and moving one
LOLA
Elizabeth Smither
On the day Lola Dearborn vowed to never
attend another funeral, she was deliberately present at three . . .
Lola Dearborn marries into Dearborn & Zander, a family of funeral directors,
when she falls for Sam Dearborn at a dance. But when Sam, and her friend Alice
Zander, injured in a freak accident, die, Lola devotes the rest of her life to
exploration. She takes up residence in an art-deco hotel, she befriends the
members of the Sylvester Quartet after gate-crashing a rehearsal. She reflects
on the different kinds of love offered by men: Luigi the Italian undertaker who
buries a dog with its owner, and Charles the retired surgeon with his disruptive
daughter, Brandy.
Lola's themes underpin an exploration of love and death (including pet
cemeteries), music and friendship. Set between Australia and New Zealand, it is
a story both acute and amusing, knowledgeable and questing - much like Lola
herself.
Smart
Money
Sheryl Sutherland & Martz Witty
Smart Money demystifies three seemingly complex areas:
TAX PLANNING
INVESTMENT PLANNING
BUSINESS PLANNING
The result is a straight-talking and practical book. When it comes to making and
saving money, you can't be too smart.
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.