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A fabulous multi-levelled novel, shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards. Clare Lacey is on a quest. In Ireland to attend an art history conference, she sets out to find her father who walked out one day to buy a packet of cigarettes when she was a child, and disappeared. She is urged on her way by chance encounters: with a woman in a high tower, a blind man at a crossroads, a singer whose song she does not understand . . . Clues lie all around on a labyrinth of walls - but the final clue lies deep within. With Irish roots and a nod to the Irish classic, The Year of the Hiker by John B. Keane, this is a contemporary novel about inheritance, belief, art, love . . . and limestone.

An evocative and moving mix of memoir and fiction from an award-winning novelist. As war is waged in the Middle East, a woman in New Zealand has her nose in a book. Kate is immersed in other battles, engrossed in eyewitness accounts of an earlier war in ancient Persia. She has grown up, left her Otago home and returned, and in all these years books have shaped her life and made sense of the world - offering mystery and solace, entertainment and enlightenment. From The Little Red Hen to Owls Do Cry, from T.S. Eliot to Aphra Behn, this frequently funny, always original novel is another extraordinary offering from the author of The Hopeful Traveller.

A mix of poetry and prose, this compilation by New Zealand's Fiona Ferrell is simultaneously a memoir, a meandering travel book, and a poetry collection. Demonstrating how a natural disaster can turn a life upside down in an instant, this book consists of four essays about walking, interrupted by poems about the Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath. Funny, timely, and deeply personal, it will resonate with a wide range of readers due to its references to France, Dunedin, Christchurch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, and Voltaire.

An astute short story that challenges the formulaic and inhumane murder mysteries of television. A body is found floating in the bottom of a swimming pool. The police have no leads. Might the nosy cleaner have a theory about this strange case? After all, she is well used to reading the mess that people leave lying all around. Award-winning writer Fiona Farrell offers a refreshing take on death and justice in this intriguing mystery.

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a different, slower rhythm. And beneath them all, the planet moves to its own immense geological time. With insight, wide-ranging knowledge and humour, this novel explores the same territory as its non-fiction twin, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire. Writing in a city devastated by major earthquakes, Fiona Farrell rebuilds a brilliant, compelling and imaginative structure from bits and pieces salvaged from one hundred years of history. A lot has happened. This is how it might have felt. 'It's a work of incredible research and incredible scope and incredible feeling . . . it's really wonderful. It think we will look back at these two books [Decline and Fall on Savage Street and The Villa at the Edge of Empire] and think of them as being very important in our local literary history as marking time and place and moment and feeling; it's a wonderful piece of art.' - Louise O'Brien, Radio NZ 'It's so vast, it shouldn't work; but it does. Primarily this is because, rather than anchoring her text to dry, historical minutiae, Farrell chooses to ground it to people, particularly family. So, as well as the impressive detail made especially graceful thanks to the author's poetic skill, the narrative follows one house settled upon the titular street and its inhabitants, particularly one family, extended and diverse. As such, chapter by chapter are, like a relay team, an exercise in passing the chronological story along. . . . Wide-ranging yet intimate, poetic yet simple, of the singular home yet speaking to the complexities of city and nation, Decline and Fall on Savage Street is a remarkable read.' - Siobhan Harvey, Waikato Times

Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. Skinny Louie, daughter of Shanghai Lil, has a baby in the Begonia House on the day of the royal visit. Maura finds the baby and takes it home. Tia grows up with magical powers into the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. The Skinny Louie Book won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

A fascinating novel of hope, love, idealism and human progress, made up of two separate stories, which can be read in isolation and yet reverberate against each other. Sometime in the 1860s, in an isolated valley on Banks Peninsula, Harry Head, "the Hermit of Hickory Bay", experimented unsuccessfully with flight. His story forms part of the exuberant blend of fact and fiction which constitutes this tale. The author takes us back to the beginnings of novel-writing, as philosophical play and serious entertainment. Think Crusoe's island, think Utopia. Twelve characters, driven by obsession, hope or the vagaries of chance, come ashore in widely different circumstances onto the same island. Once there, the game can begin. Written in two halves, this is a book to be read from either end. Begin with the past and race toward the future, or begin with the present and circle back towards the past. Time may separate the two sections yet subtle links and twisting events bring them together into a varied, intriguing and compulsive whole.

A superb collection of short stories that celebrate the power of the written word. Giving an innovative take on the many forms of reading that bombard us in our everyday lives - from e- to junk-mail, gardening to cookbooks, tourist guides to romance novels - these stories play with them all. They illuminate the gap between living and reading, that moment when words become light. These stories are funny, wise, moving and compulsive. They are examples of 'light reading' in their accessibility, but there is also depth and a beautiful style, offering the very best in literary reading.

What is the point of inventing stories when reality eclipses imagination? A little way off in the future, during a time of plague and profound social collapse, a group of friends escapes to a house in the country where they entertain themselves by playing music, eating, drinking and telling stories about their lives. There are tales of thieves and pirates, deaths and a surprise birth, a freak wave and many other stories of misadventure resulting in unexpected felicity. The Deck borrows the motifs of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Decameron, in which another small group gathered to avoid contagion and passed the time telling stories. But what is the role of fiction, this novel asks, as civilisation falters?

Offering poems that draw vividly on the landscape, history, and mythology of Ireland—while making connections with her home and childhood—this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey and the many "invasions" of past and present. She adapts and transforms several ancient Irish texts, rewriting their stories for a contemporary world.