Fiona Farrell: 12 books

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....

A young man out poaching. A beautiful maiden in a mysterious house. A perilous voyage to distant islands. A literary sensation from New Zealand, Mr. Allbones' Ferrets introduces a stunning new writer to American readers. The winner of numerous literary awards in New Zealand, Fiona Farrell is...

A fascinating 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...

**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...

A provocative and insightful exploration of rebuilding our homes, communities and cities after their devastation. Where are we? How did we get here? Where do we go now? From nineteenth-century attempts to create Utopias to America's rustbelt, from Darwin's study of worms to China's phantom cities,...

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...

On 22 September 1960, six girls gather behind the school toilets to read Peyton Place: Caroline the leader, Heather the caregiver, Kathy the actress, Raeleen the explorer, Greer the mystic and Margie the rebel. Like the historical heroines whose stories are repeatedly held up to them as models, these...

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. 

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...

**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...

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...

**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...