This marvelous collection of travel stories from the South Pacific reveals Paul Gauguin's shocking Tahitian secrets, retraces the last tragic days of Robert Louis Stevenson, and recounts the author's own haunting by Herman Melville, as well as his attempts to seduce the Slovenian Olympic ski team in the Cook Islands.

In this wonderful collection of stories and memoir from childhood, twenty-six distinguished New Zealand writers evoke memories of their early years. Their stories and memoirs resonate with love and betrayal, friendship and disloyalty, elation and anxiety. The writing features parents and teachers, peers, siblings and other relatives, the loveable and the unloveable. There are wondrous discoveries of the natural and cultural world and glimpses into the enigmatic realm that is adulthood.

‘Graeme Lay brings to tumultuous life all of Luigi’s triumphs and tragedies as he strives for a new beginning in 19th century New Zealand. And every reader will surely remember Alice, Luigi’s great love, as one of the most indomitable heroines ever.’ Stephanie Johnson

A thematic anthology from the cream of New Zealand’s writers. ‘This book is so redolent of the beach you can smell the lupins. The baches and beaches and the cool front cover are as we all remember them. Fibrolite baches, pohutukawas leaning into the sand, silvery seas, big fish, rips and tides. These stories have heart, soul and that inimitable, unsettling, New Zealand undertow woven into them.… The beach brings out the animal in all of us. We go to the beach to rest, refresh and have fun...

Time series is far more than fit-predict forecasting. Real mastery comes from intuition and is built through experimentation. Walk the full range with two practitioners: forecasting, conformal prediction, transfer learning, and beyond. Key FeaturesGrasp core concepts through clear explanations that build genuine understanding rather than surface familiarityWork with realistic datasets and develop the judgement to choose the right approach for your probl...

An affectionate and hilarious tribute to the childhood of another era, from one of Australia's favourite authorsA memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts Peter FitzSimons's account of growing up on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting; work was hard and values clear; when people stood by each other in adversity. Above all, in t...

The Remarkable, Revealing and Irresistibly Funny Memoir from Joanna Lumley'A brilliant blend of anecdote and warm, witty self-analysis' Mail on SundayYou know the icons — Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous, Purdey in The New Avengers, a Bond Girl, a model, a national treasure. But behind the wit and champagne sparkle, who is the real Joanna Lumley?In No Room for Secrets, she opens the door to her ...

Life with New Zealand's remotest family in a follow-on from the bestselling A Life on Gorge River by Robert Long. In 2010, New Zealand met its remotest family, through the writing of Robert Long - aka Beansprout - and we were intrigued. Now Beansprout's wife, Catherine Stewart, tells her story, and answers many of our questions. Why did she decide to join him on the wild West Coast, two days' walk from the nearest road? Why and how did they raise their family there? Was it terrifying to be...

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 d...

In his introduction to this anthology, Witi Ihimaera describes Auckland, Tamaki makau rau, as the place desired by many. The variety in this absorbing collection of short stories, poetry and extracts from novels and memoirs shows that while Auckland may not always have been desirable, it has certainly fascinated generations of very different writers, who have explored almost every part of this far-flung city. C.K. Stead and Maurice Gee, for example, go west, Tina Shaw and Diane Brown visit...

This new collection of rare and unpublished writing by the cult 1960s author Ann Quin explores the risks and seductions of going over the edge. The stories cut an alternative path across innovative twentieth-century writing, bridging the world of Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan with that of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.

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...