The New Ships by Duignan Kate
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Peter Collie is adrift in the wake of his wife's death. His attempts to understand the turn his life has taken lead him back to the past, to dismaying events on an Amsterdam houseboat in the seventies, returning to New Zealand and meeting Moira, an amateur painter who carried secrets of her own, and to ...Show more
Tatau: A History of Samoan Tattooing by Sean Mallon & Sebastien Galliot
Category: Ockham Book Awards
The Sāmoan Islands are virtually unique in that tattooing has been continuously practised with indigenous techniques: the design of the full male tattoo, the pe'a, has evolved in subtle ways since the nineteenth century, but remains as elaborate, meaningful and powerful as it ever was. This richly illus ...Show more
Winter Eyes by Harry Ricketts
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Poetry as comfort, poetry as confrontation. In Winter Eyes Harry Ricketts reaches into past and future, with other writers and artists - from Kipling to Dylan, Austen to Frame - in the crosscurrents. These are poems of friendship, of love's stranglehold, of the streets and buildings where history played ...Show more
Hillary's Antarctica - Adventure, exploration and establishing Scott Base by Nigel Watson
Category: History
Beautifully illustrated with Jane Ussher's photographs of the hut restoration in Antarctica, plus historic images and never-before-seen ephemera and diary entries, this is a treasure. Sir Edmund and New Zealand were supposed to be a support act to the British Commonwealth Antarctic crossing party. By he ...Show more
This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman
Category: Fiction
An utterly compelling recreation of the events that led to one of the last executions in New Zealand. Albert Black, known as the 'jukebox killer', was only twenty when he was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland on 26 July 1955. His crime fuelled growing moral pa ...Show more
With Them Through Hell by Rogers Anna
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Secondhand. Signed by the author. The thousands of New Zealand men who fought in the First World War went through hell. And right beside them was another fighting force, armed with scalpels, bandages and drugs. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers, orderlies and ambulance drivers,dentists, ch ...Show more
The Ice Shelf by Anne Kennedy
Category: Fiction
The Ice Shelf - an eco-comedy. On the eve of flying to Antarctica to take up an arts fellowship, thirty-something Janice, recently separated, has a long night of remembrance, regret and realisation as she goes about the city looking for a friend to take care of her fridge while she's away. En route she ...Show more
Dear Oliver by Peter Wells
Category: Ockham Book Awards
When writer and historian Peter Wells found a cache of family letters amongst his elderly mother's effects, he realised that he had the means of retracing the history of a not-untypical family swept out to New Zealand during the great nineteenth-century human diaspora from Britain. His family experience ...Show more
Hudson & Halls - The food of love by Drayton Joanne
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Hudson & Halls: The food of love is more than just a love story, though a love story it certainly is. It is a tale of two television chefs who helped change the bedrock bad attitudes of a nation in the 1970s and 80s to that unspoken thing - homosexuality. Peter Hudson and David Halls became reluctan ...Show more
All This by Chance by Vincent O'Sullivan
Category: Ockham Book Awards
If we don't have the past in mind, it is merely history. If we do, it is still part of the present. Esther's grandparents first meet at a church dance in London in 1947. Stephen, a shy young Kiwi, has left to practise pharmacy on the other side of the world. Eva has grown up English, with no memory of t ...Show more
The New Zealand Horse by Deborah Coddington
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Second hand. A magnificent tribute to the New Zealand horse, documenting its pivotal role in the development of the early colony, in farming, transport, war, sport and in our affections. Writer Deborah Coddington and photographer Jane Ussher capture the strength, beauty and mystery of the horse across ...Show more
We Can Make a Life by Chessie Henry
Category: Ockham Book Awards
Hours after the 2011 Christchuch Earthquake, Kaikoura-based doctor Chris Henry crawled through the burning CTV building to rescue those who were trapped. Six years later, his daughter Chessie interviews him in an attempt to understand the trauma that led her father to burnout, in the process unravelling ...Show more