Items20The creator’s order
  1. 1Potiki (1986)Potiki (1986) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1986A proposal to develop a stretch of coast brings outside pressure to a small Māori community. The child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama sees the dispute in ways the adults can’t. Read Patricia Grace for the life of a place as it’s told from within, in voices that have their own way of reckoning with time.0
  2. 2Greta and Valdin (2021)Greta and Valdin (2021) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2021Greta falls for a fellow tutor who can’t pronounce her surname. Her brother Valdin still wants the ex who moved to Buenos Aires. From an Auckland apartment, Rebecca K Reilly follows the small emergencies of a Māori, Russian, and Catalan family whose members are rarely as inscrutable to each other…0
  3. 3Sons for the Return Home (1973)Sons for the Return Home (1973)Published Jan 1, 1973A Samoan student at Auckland University falls in love with a young woman from a wealthy white family. Read Albert Wendt for the private ease the two can find together and the difficulty of carrying it into places where their families and other people already have ideas about who they should be.0
  4. 4The Axeman's CarnivalThe Axeman's CarnivalMarnie rescues a magpie chick on a South Island farm. Tama learns to talk and becomes famous, while the strain in Marnie’s marriage grows harder to hide. Catherine Chidgey lets the bird be funny without making him innocent of everything he sees. His apparent smallness makes him an unsettling…0
  5. 5Pounamu Pounamu (2010)Pounamu Pounamu (2010)Published Jan 1, 2010Start with “A Game of Cards,” in which the rivalry between Nani Miro and Mrs. Heta keeps a card table lively. Witi Ihimaera’s first collection is worth reading for how much affection and grievance can move through an ordinary game, and for the jokes that survive even when the setting shifts to a…0
  6. 6Birnam Wood (2023)Birnam Wood (2023) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2023A landslide cuts off a South Island town and leaves a farm apparently empty. A guerrilla gardening group and an American billionaire both want it. Read Eleanor Catton for the point at which each side’s explanation of what it’s doing on the land becomes as gripping as the question of what’s really…0
  7. 7Ordinary People Like Us (2026)Ordinary People Like Us (2026)Published Jan 1, 2026Kelly Ana Morey follows five generations of Māori women from the gumfields of the Far North through inner-city Auckland and on to London. Read it for the shift in scale across generations, from work that ties a person to one place to family connections that can travel across oceans.0
  8. 8How to Loiter in a Turf War (2022)How to Loiter in a Turf War (2022)Published Jan 1, 2022Three friends spend a day in Auckland (Tāmaki Makaurau), with gentrification changing the neighborhood they share. Read Coco Solid for the jokes, friction, and protective instincts of the friendship. You can feel how much the city belongs to the trio in the way they talk about it.0
  9. 9Amma (2024)Amma (2024)Published Jan 1, 2024Josephina’s family moves from Sri Lanka to New Zealand, and years later her granddaughter Annie turns up at the door of an uncle the family cast out before she was born. Read Saraid de Silva for the distance between what a family remembers together and what it takes one person going abroad to find…0
  10. 10The Bone People (1983)The Bone People (1983) 8.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1983The artist Kerewin lives alone in a tower by the sea until a boy named Simon turns up. His foster father, Joe, can be protective and brutal. Read Keri Hulme for an eccentric, difficult novel about how a household forms around people who have learned to keep their distance.0