Maurice Gee

"[This book] brings Maurice Gee's ... family chronicle up to the present day. The career of Duggie Plum (as ruthless in politics as in sex) is relayed to us ... by his journalist cousin, Raymond Sole. Raymond - known to his family as Raymong and to his enemies as R. Sole - sharpens the story of his own doomed marriage against that of his relationship to Duggie: the charged, competitive, love-hate relationship between a man of action and a man of words."--Back cover.

Caroline finds a pair of magic spectacles which reveal a hidden world at the center of New Zealand, a worldthreatened with destruction if the spectacles fall into the wrong hands.

215 pages : map ; 23 cm.HL690L Lexile

As a young man in the 1930s, Josef Mandl battles the Nazis on the streets of Vienna. Fleeing to New Zealand, he is interned as a dangerouos alien on Somes Island in Wellington harbour. After the war he becomes a successful businessman, a family patriarch. Now, in old age, he looks back, retracing his life.

In 1915 Kitty Wix and her friends try to stop the arsonist who is terrifying their small New Zealand town.

This is a novel of family secrets and tensions, and distant past grievances, set like so much of Maurice Gee's fiction in the West Auckland town of Loomis. It is also vintage Maurice Gee, widely recognised as New Zealand's finest living fiction writer. Publication will be a significant event. New Zealand fiction doesn't get any better than this. Three brothers and sisters, all now in their eighties, two of them living in the old family home, are struggling to cope with events that have happened way back in the past. It all bursts into the open when an old school friend visits Loomis, with malice in his heart. He keeps the biggest secret of all, about the disappearance of a girl many years before. As the novel reaches its climax, the tensions reach breaking point, and violence breaks out. The death of one of the protagonists seems inevitable.--Publisher's description.

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....

A novel of Trinidad featuring Alford George, the son of a poor farm worker who rises above his class through sheer perseverance. He learns to speak properly by listening to broadcasts from England, studies hard to become a teacher, then turns activist to improve the educational system. That sends him into politics. By the author of The Wine of Astonishment.

While vacationing with relatives in Auckland, twins Theo and Rachel discover that they are endowed with special powers to oppose mysterious giant creatures that are determined to destroy the world.

Susan and Nick are leaving the magical land of O. But as they prepare to step back to Earth, strange evil forces reach out to ensnare them. For Susan, and for the Motherstone, there is one final task. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

In 1933, Herbert Muskie returns to his rundown hometown of Loomis, New Zealand, and uses a combination of cunning and psychological threats to take control of the lives of twelve-year-old Colin Potter and his family as part of a plan to get even for the mistreatment he suffered as a schoolboy.

Gool is the sequel to ' Salt' - Sixteen years have passed since Pearl from Company and Hari from Blood Burrow defeated the tyrant Ottmar - Now their children, Xantee and Lo, face an even more dangerous foe - Hari lies dangerously ill with a fragment of a strange creature wrapped around his throat, draining his life - The beast is called gool, meaning Unbelonger - It is one of many, destroying the mountains and jungles of the world.