Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen's Land by Kristyn Harman
Category: History
Everyone knows Australia was once a penal colony, but few realise that New Zealand prisoners were sent there. During the mid-nineteenth century at least 110 people were transported from New Zealand to serve time as convict labourers in the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).
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
Heloise by Mandy Hager
Category: Fiction
What happens when the 12th century's most famous French lovers are caught in the crossfire of factions, religious reform and blind ambition? Heloise is a determined young woman with an exceptional mind, longing to pursue learning rather than marriage or life as a cloistered nun. Her path inevitably cros ...Show more
The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf; Lillian Melcher (Illustrator)
Category: Fiction | Series: Pantheon Graphic Library
Meet Alexander von Humboldt: the great lost scientist, visionary, thinker and daring explorer; the man who first predicted climate change, who has more things named after him than anyone else (including a sea on the moon), and who has inspired generations of writers, thinkers and revolutionaries . . . ...Show more
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Category: Fiction
This haunting interpretation, exploring the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of a poor student who murders a miserly pawnbroker, is reimagined in Putin-era St. Petersburg. Hailed a 'resounding success', it brings fresh relevance to this chilling tale.
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
Dancing With the King - The rise and fall of the King Country 1864-1885 by Belgrave Michael
Category: Ockham Book Awards
After the battle of Orakau in 1864 and the end of the war in the Waikato, Tawhiao, the second Maori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed isolation in the Rohe Potae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state - a land governed by the Maor ...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
Night Horse by Smither Elizabeth
Category: Poetry
In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday - mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts - and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And throughout ...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