April Highlights 2010

On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna's brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?

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In 2008 the famous painter Don Binney completed a suite of 24 absolutely charming coloured pencil drawings of Auckland's West Coast, from Huia to Te Henga (Bethells). They are evocative of the coast so many New Zealanders love and they are magnificent works in themselves. They are accompanied by text that takes the reader on an imaginary journey from Huia to Te Henga, commenting on the landmarks shown in each of the drawings. They also draw on Binney's extensive contact with this coast and with the Waitakeres in general: in early a... read more

When Alice finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of Alzheimer's Disease she is just fifty years old.
A university professor, wife, and mother of three, she still has so much more to do - books to write, places to see, grandchildren to meet. But when she can't remember how to make her famous Christmas pudding, when she gets lost in her own back yard, when she fails to recognise her actress daughter after a superb performance, she comes up with a desperate plan. But can she see it through? Should she see it through?
Los... read more

Two children: Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance. Two women: Lola, their mother, and Nonie, their aunt, who for mysterious reasons is the one to raise them. Lark and Termite imaginatively enters the hearts and thoughts of a family, from their home in 1950s West Virginia to Korea, where their father has been sent to fight. It is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.

In this relevant, timely book a leading scientist asks, are scientific advances a curse or a blessing? Professor Winston argues that contained within each of our finest inventions is the potential for great harm.

She was born in 1903 in Kiev to a well-off Jewish family. The authors of this fascinating biography have had access to previously unpublished documents and to surviving family members in Russia, researching there her childhood in the Ukraine, and tracing her odyssey first to St Petersburg, where her father was a successful financier, and then, as the family was forced to flee the Russian Revolution, to Finland, Sweden and finally France in 1919. They settled in Paris, and in 1926 she married another Jewish emigre, Michel Epstein. W... read more

'There is no place in normal New Zealand society for the man who is different', wrote William Harrison (Bill) Pearson. One of New Zealand's most distinguished fiction writers and sharpest critics, Pearson's life was also fraught with contradiction and secrecy, largely because of his homosexuality. Born in Greymouth in 1922, he grew up in a society dominated by a rugged ideal of New Zealand manhood; not an easy childhood or adolescence for an unusually sensitive boy who preferred intellectual pursuits to sports. He went to universit... read more

Destiny can take many shapes. For Henry, a writer struggling to finish a book about the Holocaust, it arrives in the form of a puzzling envelope from a stranger. The envelope takes him into a taxidermist's workshop. Filled with lovingly preserved animals from all corners of the globe, this place is unlike anywhere he has ever been.

A gripping psychological thriller played out in cyberspace, from the bestselling author of <i>Chocolat</i> and <i>The Lollipop Shoes</i>.<i>Blueyedboy</i> is the brilliant new novel from Joanne Harris: a dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysfunctional family, a blind child prodigy, and a serial murderer who is not who he seems. Told through posts on badguysrock@webjournal.com, this is a thriller that makes creative use of all the di... read more