It’s 1928 and the world’s most famous novelist, Thomas Hardy, is dying in the upstairs room of Max Gate, the house he built in his beloved Dorset. Downstairs, his high-powered literary friends are becoming locked in a bitter fight with local supporters. Who owns Hardy’s remains? Who knew the great man best? What are the secrets of Max Gate? Nellie Titterington, a maid at the house, narrates this earthy and emotionally-charged novel about a world of ambition, duty, belonging and love.

Witty and acute, this daring collection of stories is a sharp-eyed look at modern relationships and the pressures and delights of everyday life. With control and humor, this ensemble of fables, satires, notes to self, snapshots, and vignettes from one of New Zealand's finest authors offers beautiful yet disquieting views of contemporary living in easy, conversational tones.

Jamie is a forty-one-year-old drug addict. His kidneys, master chemists of the body, have just produced a stone. He's in terrible pain and he needs surgery. Great news. However, the hospital stay doesn't quite work out and Jamie, knowing it's the lowest thing he's ever done, decides he must go somewhere he hasn't been in years—home; to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely this pair, with their access to pharmaceuticals, and their blood ties, will help him. And if all else fails, there is Jamie's insomniac mother, who has various prescriptions running around inside her cupboards.

An old hand at deception, the character of Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other end is a pair of similarly desperate eighteen-year-olds: Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to get on the methadone programme and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory. As some kind of solution, Sally and Shane embark on a blackmail plot which eventually draws in many of the other characters and which builds to an explosive end.

Chemistry is a story about bad choices and those who suffer the consequences. It is also a story about the resourcefulness of the sufferers, and about those who come through. Dark and funny and frightening, it is a novel fastened hard to the recognizable details of small-town New Zealand life, which moves with great force to its unexpected and eloquent conclusion. It is Damien Wilkins''s finest novel yet.

Martyrs' Crossing tells a stunning story of love, fear, divided loyalties, ruined friendships, and personal sacrifice—against a backdrop of raging war in the Holy Land.

One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him. He is drawn to Marina, the boy's American-born mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as "her soldier." In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes. Marina's father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandson's story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship. Caught in history's terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces. Martyrs' Crossing is a poignant story of the ambiguities of war—of inarticulate longing and broken vows—set in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank.

From one of our most astute writers comes an irreverent, hilarious portrait of the state of California, its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, celebrities she can't place, famous salons, and the neglected office of one very special 9,000-year-old woman.

Megan has an insensitive husband, a gifted ten-year-old daughter, a wavering career as a novelist, and (thanks to a whimsical legacy from her father) a bright-red convertible. She also has a burning desire to please, perfectly, each person that she loves. But there has never been a taker for all she has to offer. Not until she walks into her daughter's fifth-grade classroom—and meets Charlie.

It should be the happy ending. Instead, it becomes just the beginning for a love story as pure and complicated as Megan herself. Megan's husband makes the divorce a roadshow; Charlie's wife turns it into a nervous breakdown. FInally it takes a series of extraordinary miscalculations, and a solitary pilgrimage into her own past, before Megan learns what her heart has always told her: that a woman doesn't always need Liberation to be really free.

At her psychiatrist's behest, Ellery McQueen—daughter, niece, and cousin in a family of formidable women—sets out to describe her family in writing with humorously perceptive results.

The date is 1918, the place, Rangoon. The shockwaves of war and revolution that shattered Europe have barely reached the British Empire's outposts. Here at least, life is as it always was. Drawn to Rangoon, as so many other casualities of the new century, comes Charlotte Lewes—a twenty-five-year-old Englishwoman widowed by the war, a woman whom grief has aged and loneliness left numb. There she meets and loves John Dollar, a sailor. He is both symbol and reality, the innocent catalyst around whom things happen.

Three ships set out from Rangoon Harbour to chart a small island, one hundred miles off the coast; aboard are John Dollar and Charlotte, Charlotte's girl pupils from the school in Rangoon, and the children's parents. This voyage, which begins in patriotic splendour, will carry them all into catastrophe, into an unthinkable vortex of change that will turn the whole world upside down. Composed in language whose elegance can chill to the bones, John Dollar is a story that blazes across the page.

This is a collection of the stories of Marianne Wiggins. Varied in their style, characters and settings, these are tales about passion, about desire, madness, jealousy, revenge and carnal pleasure.

"As evidenced in this provocative collection of short stories, Wiggins seems able to change mood and locale, voice and narrative point of view, with dazzling skill. These 14 tales have a fine variety, but the best are those that involve characters who speak in regional patois and idiosyncratic turns of phrase. In 'Ridin' Up Front with Carl and Marl,' a trio of Southerners encounters a hardbitten photographer from Massachusetts who tells them, 'You people have no sense of what life's really like'; but she's wrong. 'The Gentleman's Arms' takes place in England, where would-be lovers united after 20 years encounter a monumental let-down, and at the end, a poignant moment of insight. 'Stonewall Jackson's Wife' herself is the ghostly narrator of that story, which surges with sadness. The narrator's colloquial speech places 'Insomnia' squarely in the '80s; her wry, bitter voice is oddly and immensely affecting . . . the title story, which ends the collection, embodies Wiggins's best skills: her ability to illuminate commonplace truths with a precise, clarifying vision. Wiggin's stories do not give up their secrets easily; but their subtle unfolding can cause chills along the reader's spine." —Publishers Weekly

Eveless Eden tells the story of a passionate love affair between a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper and the tough, sexy, talented photographer he meets at the site of an ecological disaster in Africa. Noah swings between disillusion and romanticism, cynicism and faith, despair and hope, as he and Lilith pursue their adventure in Paris, London, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and through the scandal of AIDS tainted blood in the orphanages of Nicolai Ceausescu's Romania. Lilith's fateful attraction to danger makes her vulnerable to the seductive appeal of a mysterious Romanian, Adam Pentru, a man of evil genius, Minister of Trade in the Ceausescu government and a spy for the British. When Adam enters the picture, the story darkens and narrative suspense mounts, as Noah struggles to piece together a story more horrifying than any he has ever covered. Eveless Eden offers a sweeping vision of individual, political, and global evil in the modern world.