I’m a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand and I’ve always been drawn to stories of struggle, especially where a character fights against outside control. I started writing for the high school students I was teaching and got hooked on the YA genre. I love it partly because it crosses all genres – I can write about a 14-year-old girl trying to live in a repressive religious cult but I can also write about a 15-year-old boy who’s a champion kart driver. Karting at top level takes enormous skill as I discovered, but it also has room for dirty tricks.
Displaced is a historical young adult novel rich in detail, atmosphere, and life of a family in New Zealand in the early 1870s.
The main character Eloise is courageous in the way she copes with her life being torn apart by the men she trusted and believed in.
The fate of women in this time in history is completely held by the men of the family.
I loved the characters and I adore historical novels. This one is set in New Zealand when none of the Pakeha (white) settlers had heard the Maori name for the country of Aotearoa. Eloise, the protagonist is a young woman who is forced to forge her own way in an alien society filled with several different, and often conflicting, alien cultures to her. The research the author has done is impeccable so that it’s possible to immerse yourself in the fascinating but difficult life…
An enthralling historical novel of immigration, courage and first love from an award-winning New Zealand author.
Eloise and her family must leave Cornwall on a treacherous sea journey to start a new life in 1870s colonial New Zealand. On the ship across, Eloise meets Lars, a Norwegian labourer travelling below decks, and their lives begin to intertwine. When her brother disappears, her father leaves and the family are left to fend for themselves in their new home, Eloise must find the strength to stand up for what she believes in and the people she loves.
Although two of my nonfiction books—The Dream of Water and Polite Lies—are about traveling from the American Midwest to my native country of Japan, I'm not a traveler by temperament. I long to stay put in one place. Chimney swifts cover the distance between North America and the Amazon basin every fall and spring. I love to stand in the driveway of my brownstone to watch them. That was the last thing Katherine Russell Rich and I did together in what turned out to be the last autumn of her life before the cancer she’d been fighting came back. Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, along with the four other books I’m recommending, expresses an indomitable spirit of adventure.
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All portrays the contact between seeming opposites: the author who grew up in Boston and traveled to New Zealand when she was a graduate student in Australia and the Maori man she met there and married; the “colonizers” who were her direct ancestors and the “natives” her husband descended from; the history of the encounters between the two groups (including the story of Captain Cook). At the heart of this complex, mesmerizing, and unflinching story is the couple’s devotion to their three sons—boys growing up in a Boston suburb and navigating their identities as “a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized” as Ms. Thompson explains to them in a letter she tucks into the folder containing her life insurance policy.
Come On Shore and We Will Kill And Eat You All is a sensitive and vibrant portrayal of the cultural collision between Westerners and Maoris, from Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 to the author's unlikely romance with a Maori man. An intimate account of two centuries of friction and fascination, this intriguing and unpredictable book weaves a path through time and around the world in a rich exploration of the past and the future that it leads to.
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve always been interested in social justice and human rights, and my own writing explores such issues, including who holds the power and who exerts the control. By writing about real-world issues in a speculative future, it allows us to peel back the layers of conditioning and look at ourselves and our actions through the eyes of an outsider – which forces us to examine our best and worst human traits. I love the way speculative fiction can do this, and I love that it challenges us to do better.
Though not packaged as YA, I think it sits well here. It’s speculative cli-fi, imagining an Aotearoa New Zealand ravaged by climate change. Steeped with Māori references, it’s a rollicking good yarn with a serious undertow and questions about how we care (and don’t care) for our environment, and the things that join and divide us.
In a radically changed Aotearoa New Zealand, Van's life in the swamp is hazardous. Sheltered by Rau and Matewai, he mines plastic and trades to survive. When a young visitor summons him to the fenced settlement on the hill, he is offered a new and frightening responsibility-a perilous inland journey that leads to a tense confrontation and the prospect of a rebuilt world.
`Patchett's is an extraordinary imaginative achievement: an unsettlingly strange, and fully realised, narrative situation and world. I read The Burning River experiencing a mixture of intellectual exhilaration and emotional agitation of an intensity fiction has not produced…
A dual citizen of Australia and the US, Christina Thompson has traveled extensively in the Pacific, including through most of the archipelagoes in Polynesia. She is the author of two books about Polynesia: a memoir of her marriage to a Māori man called Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All and a history of the ancient voyagers of the Pacific called Sea People. She edits the literary journal Harvard Review andteaches in the writing program at Harvard University Extension.
Two Worlds, by Dame Anne Salmond, is another crossover work—part history and part anthropology. The author, an eminent New Zealand anthropologist, uses her knowledge of traditional Māori culture (what people believed, what they ate, how they lived) to flesh out the historical record left by early European visitors to Aotearoa/New Zealand. The result is a rich, authoritative account of encounters that for far too long have been described from only one point of view.
Anne Salmond's brilliant study of first contact between Maori and European explorers - a trail-blazing achievement in narrative New Zealand history.
'Professor Salmond has written a remarkable book. Remarkable for its meticulous research, for its ability to grip the reader's attention; but most of all, remarkable that no-one has done anything quite like it before in the exploration of New Zealand history.' -Naylor Hillary, The Press
Two Worlds is Anne Salmond's award-winning account of the first points of contact between Maori and European explorers. It is a provocative, penetrating examination of those dramatic first meetings, casting them in a completely…
I was an avid reader from the age of six. Books inspired me and, as a shy girl, stories helped me find the confidence to be myself. I felt amazed and inspired by reading – finding out about parts of the world I had never been to. Especially as an adult, I’ve been blessed with wonderful, female friends. These are the themes I explore now in my books. I hope to inspire young readers to be themselves and celebrate friendship. I love travelling and nature. I've lived in various parts of the US and England. Through my writing, I hope to share the wonder of different cultures and natural settings.
I love the ocean, and love stories about strong, ground-breaking young women. This tale is beautifully set in a coastal town in New Zealand. Kahu, a young girl from a lineage of Maori leaders, can communicate with whales. Her grandfather does not expect this and rejects her because of her gender. Kahu proves without a doubt that she is a competent and natural leader. I love how Kahu prevails. She is strong in herself, and she never shies away from the truth – that she is the natural leader and a whale rider like her ancestor.
Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Maori tribe in Whangara, on the East Coast of New Zealand - a tribe that claims descent from the legendary 'whale rider'. In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir - there's only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle…
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who cares deeply about social issues and human rights, I believe fiction has the power to change hearts and minds and bring us all together with greater compassion and understanding. When I was growing up here, there were few books published by Pacific or Māori writers and we were taught little about their customs or mythologies. I’ve loved watching this change over the last forty-odd years (and particularly the last ten years) and can see how access to these stories has not only empowered Māori and Pacific youth and brought them closer to their culture but enriched everyone who lives in our pacific paradise!
Another classic title by one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most-loved storytellers. This moving story follows the special friendship forged between Jonasi, a lonely deaf-mute pacific islander, and a huge white turtle. It’s a book about isolation and prejudice, and how love can heal all. One review describes it as ‘somewhere between fact and fiction, superstition and the supernatural.’It’s another that’s been made into a fabulous film.
The Silent One is Jonasi, sent from the sea as a baby to grow up in an isolated Pacific village. Separated from the villagers by his silence and their prejudices, Jonasi finds solace in his underwater world where he develops a special relationship with a huge white turtle. However, the superstitious villagers see both Jonasi and the turtle as evil spirits. A series of natural disasters and a struggle for leadership within the village sweep Jonasi toward his strange destiny.
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who cares deeply about social issues and human rights, I believe fiction has the power to change hearts and minds and bring us all together with greater compassion and understanding. When I was growing up here, there were few books published by Pacific or Māori writers and we were taught little about their customs or mythologies. I’ve loved watching this change over the last forty-odd years (and particularly the last ten years) and can see how access to these stories has not only empowered Māori and Pacific youth and brought them closer to their culture but enriched everyone who lives in our pacific paradise!
A book about conquering bullying and standing up for what you believe in, the Māori word ‘pōrangi’ in title means mentally ill. It tells the story of Niko, who lives in a small, rural Aotearoa New Zealand town with a sacred hot spring—and a taniwha (a water monster of Māori legend) named Taukere. When his grandfather dies, Niko must bring the townsfolk together to stop a prison being built on sacred land and convince them the taniwha is real.
Twelve-year-old Niko lives in Pohe Bay, a small, rural town with a sacred hot spring and a taniwha named Taukere. The government wants to build a prison over the home of the taniwha, and Niko's grandfather is busy protesting. People call him porangi, crazy, but when he dies, it's up to Niko to convince his community that the taniwha is real and stop the prison from being built. With help from his friend Wai, Niko must unite his whanau, honour his grandfather and stand up to his childhood bully.
Kristyn Harman is an award-winning researcher who successfully completed doctoral research investigating the circumstances in which at least ninety Australian Aboriginal men were transported as convicts within the Australian colonies following their involvement in Australia’s frontier wars. She has published extensively on historical topics, and currently lectures in History at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. Having lived in both countries, Kristyn is fascinated by the different understandings that New Zealanders and Australians have of their nation’s respective pasts. She is particularly intrigued, if not perturbed, by the way in which most New Zealanders acknowledge their nation’s frontier wars, while many Australians choose to deny the wars fought on their country’s soil.
While many New Zealanders realize that frontier wars were fought following the country’s annexation by England in 1840, very few are aware of a series of bitterly contested battles that took place over the half-century prior to New Zealand becoming a crown colony. This book is significant as Ron Crosby reveals how, after Europeans began to visit the north of New Zealand, Māori traded with the newcomers. They grew food, and replenished supplies for whalers, timber getters, and even for missionaries in exchange for European trade goods that included muskets. Armed with muskets, Māori iwi (tribes) from the far north of New Zealand became well placed to go to war against other iwi with whom they had issues to resolve. Fueled by European technology, the resulting series of battles, referred to as the ‘musket wars’, saw more than 20,000 Māori killed prior to 1840. Many more were enslaved or became…
First published by Reed in 1999, with an introduction by Michael King, The Musket Wars established Ron Crosby’s reputation as a daring, original chronicler of New Zealand history. This best-selling history provides the first comprehensive account of the wars that ravaged the country in the early 1800s, when iwi with newly acquired muskets unleashed terrible utu (revenge) on foes, helped by other introductions like potatoes that fuelled long-range taua (war parties). Ron Crosby weaves the strands of this conflict into an immensely readable narrative, guiding the reader through its complexities with lists of protagonists, a chronology, indexes and above all,…
I’m a historian of early American history and a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I came to my love of history through reading fiction as a child, and I’m still an avid reader of good stories of all kinds. Asking new questions about history requires imagination, and writers of good historical fiction provide brilliant ways to engage the past. They offer something real and human that transcends the need to footnote or fact check, so I turn off my historical accuracy meter when I read books like these. My list encapsulates some of my favorite novels for when I want to be a time traveler from my couch.
I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand, and I picked this up mostly because of that desire. (Also, TBH, because a reviewer said this was a book people would either be too scared to start or would never put down, and I took that as a challenge.)
Despite these pretty simple reasons for starting—and finishing—the book, The Luminaries has become one of my all-time favorite novels.
Set in the mid-1860s, Catton tells the story of Scotsman Walter Moody. He travels to New Zealand’s southern island and finds himself immediately intertwined in more than one mystery. He serves as the reader’s guide to the numinous web of lies, swindles, murders, and ambitions that surround the town of Hokitika.
Catton weaves the place into a muddy and pungent microcosm of Britain’s global empire. Her characters, especially the suicidal prostitute Anna Wetherell, take the reader into a more diverse, beautiful, and intriguing…
'A breathtakingly ambitious mystery ... as beautiful as it is triumphant.' Daily Mail
An astonishing, epic story of promise, deceit and desperation in New Zealand's gold rush.
'What brings a fellow down here, you know, to the ends of the earth - what sparks a man?'
It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has…
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who cares deeply about social issues and human rights, I believe fiction has the power to change hearts and minds and bring us all together with greater compassion and understanding. When I was growing up here, there were few books published by Pacific or Māori writers and we were taught little about their customs or mythologies. I’ve loved watching this change over the last forty-odd years (and particularly the last ten years) and can see how access to these stories has not only empowered Māori and Pacific youth and brought them closer to their culture but enriched everyone who lives in our pacific paradise!
Tui and Kae, fourteen-year-old twins, are sucked into the Māori underworld, Rarohenga, and must rescue their mother before they’re all trapped there forever. Exciting, mysterious, and full of Māori mythology, this book shows how, in order to truly understand our own unique identity, we must also understand who and where we came from.
It seems like an ordinary day when Tui and Kae, fourteen-year-old twins, get home from school – until they find their mother, Maia, has disappeared and a swirling vortex has opened up in her room. They are sucked into this portal and dragged down to Rarohenga, the Māori Underworld, a shadowy place of infinite dark levels, changing landscapes and untrustworthy characters. Maia has been kidnapped by their estranged father, Tema, enchanted to forget who she really is and hidden somewhere here. Tui and Kae have to find a way through this maze, outwit the shady characters they meet, break the…
