Stephanie Johnson: 34 books

This year things will be different for Steph Johnson. She's now a junior in high school, and she's ready for a change in lifestyle. But she didn't expect her first boyfriend to be the most popular and handsome guy in school, let alone find herself at a new school in a different state with three incredible...

It is 1918 and Spanish Flu is epidemic in Suva, the capital of Fiji. Twelve year old Olive is sent with her brothers and grandmother to Taveuni to stay with her childless aunt and uncle on their sugar plantation to escape the disease as her mother lies dying of the flu in their family home. The months...

For novelist Stephanie Johnson, her relationship with Australia and Australians has been an ambivalent one. She has lived there for periods in her life, and her first book, a collection of short stories, was actually published in Australia. She was described then as a young Australian writer, something...

**A collection of short stories to dip into and devour, by a prize-winning writer.**These 23 stories show the breadth of Stephanie Johnson's fine writing. It features poignant insights as well as her sharp wit, with characters as diverse as a woman arranging a second wife for her husband, a criminal returning to the care of his mother, and a widow who hears an octopus call her name.

A fascinating novel about secrets, finding a home and early colonial New Zealand.*'I miss my smiling son more than any other man before or since.'*London 1866. Elizabeth Smith is struggling to survive when she hears that her former New Zealand employers, Judge and Lady Martin, are returning to England....

This unique novel is both a compelling love story and an insightful writing manual. *'Writers take what we learn of human nature and, fuelled by our longings for other existences and other times, forge new identities that can be as real as she is, sitting with her dog on the weathered step of the...

A moving novel about a blind son with a love for music that surpassed sight and gave him a vision uniquely his own. A fortnight after jazz pianist Carl Tyler's funeral, his lover Tamara has one week to go before she leaves New Zealand to return to her native Chicago. His mother Nola wants to solve...

**Darkly satirical and wickedly funny, this prize-winning novel takes a tilt at a wide range of contemporary matters.**What happened that connects a diverse group of characters, along with an ex-All Black and an elephant? The people who committed the act of revenge in 1985 thought it was perfectly...

**Wry and insightful, this short story is told by a young American girl, who is all too knowing about her own world, but ignorant about the Kiwi strangers she meets.**When Ruthie's father needs a drink, he takes his young daughter with him. She sits in the bar, with her pink panther, watching the...

**A brilliant novel about history, the forgetting and rewriting of it, and a satire on a society that has lost compassion in the process.**Smooch is a 'Whistler', a genetically altered lapdog with special talents, including the ability to remember his previous incarnations and to communicate directly...

**Wit, compassion and insight combine in this entertaining novel that explores the politics and human comedy behind writers' festivals and the publishing industry.**Writers' festivals can be hotbeds of literary and romantic intrigue, and the Oceania is up there with the best of them. Rookie director...

A powerful novel about friendship, guilt and sex and our changing notions of loyalty and culpability. Friends since childhood, Norman and Lyn grow up as next-door neighbours at the turn of the twentieth century. When Lyn is sent to manage a central North Island timber mill at the tender age of fourteen,...

Returning to the biting and hilarious satire of contemporary New Zealand conveyed so well in the prize-winning The Shag Incident, this is a daring, astute and rollicking novel. John Tomb saw more of the world than most Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. From England to Australia to New Zealand,...

**An epic novel of love and religion that sweeps across New Zealand and America at the turn of the nineteenth century.**In 1899 William McQuiggan leaves his young Australian wife and new-born twins in New Zealand and travels to America in search of God. Belief is the story of his journey and of his...