It is not the courage to go back up that we need. It's the courage to go down. Just to go on … ' In 1977 a British expedition led by Himalayan veteran Geoff Strickland, summiteer of K2 and Everest among others, set off to attempt the first ascent of unclimbed Puthemojar - the 'Mantis' - in the Karakoram. 25,311 feet high, renowned for its difficulty, and with a fearsome reputation, the Mantis had claimed the life of at least one climber on each of the previous expeditions that had attempte...

A poem is a vote. It chooses freedom of imagination, freedom of critical thought, freedom of speech. A collection of political poems in its very essence argues for the power of the democratic voice. Here New Zealand poets from diverse cultures, young and old, new and seasoned, from the Bay of Islands to Bluff, rally for justice on everything from a degraded environment to systemically embedded poverty; from the long, painful legacy of colonialism to explosive issues of sexual consent. Comm...

'However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like marriage, for better or for worse.'Mostly Mischief's ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic...

NEW ZEALAND'S FIRST MAJOR CLIFI NOVEL BY AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR PHILIP TEMPLEElliott from Generation Zero says, 'I've barely slept. I've been up until early hours of the morning all week. I've been surviving on coffee with bloodshot eyes. I've been obsessed. The reason? I've been reading MiSTORY'.SO - Is this what our future looks like?The surveillance society, climate change, global financial crises, the end of o...

Based on real events in Germany, this vividly told and deeply moving novel tells of one woman's love for a fellow artist, her struggle to survive the war and her desperation to keep alive the spirit of creativity. Most novels about the Nazi period portray Germans as the perpetrators of war and genocide. This work provides an authentic insight into how ordinary Germans - distinguished only by their artistic skill - suffered under Nazi rule and the catastrophe of war. Based ...

A compelling and thoughtful memoir about a significant figure on New Zealand's literary - and natural - landscape. 'The stories that I think worth telling are of how, as a young man, I left home on the other side of the world half a century ago and took the chance to become a New Zealander. More, of becoming a New Zealand writer now able to look back over 50 years and relate not only what happened to me, of how I grew up, but also something of how the country has grown...

Beak of the Moon  is unique in New Zealand literature, a celebratory parable of the natural world and, like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a political allegory that has never been more relevant than today.

Mysterious and evocative, tantalising and erotic, this unique novel explores the qualities of love and obsession. Marienbad, the central European spa resort, is immortalised in the romantic imagination for its legendary doomed love affairs - Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzow, Chopin and Marie Wodzinska, Edward VII and Mizzi Pistl, Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer. In a Marienbad winter, within its ambience of history and allusion, theatre and illusion, a modern pair of lovers loo...

The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems ...**"A true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly." —**New York Times Book ReviewIt is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. O...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "gripping book about this extraordinary man who lived passionately and died unnecessarily" (USA Today) in post-9/11 Afghanistan, from the bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air.In 2002, Pat Tillman walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to join the Army and became an icon of American patriotism. When he was killed in Afghanistan two years later, a legend was born. But the real Pat Tillma...

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this “extraordinary” and beloved novel that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review), named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a weal...

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes—charged with the brutal murder of her former master and sent to await execution on an isolated farm.Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at ...