Here are 92 books that I Am Not Esther fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
Elizabeth Knox is a world-class writer with an exceptional imagination and her fantasy novel, Dreamhunter, is a great introduction to her work. Set in an alternative past, dreamhunters harvest dreams which are transmitted to the public for entertainment and therapy – or worse. Fifteen-year-old Laura Hame must enter The Place of Dreams to uncover what happened to her missing dreamhunter father and in the process reveals how the government has used dreams to control an ever-growing population of convicts and political dissenters. Those who love Philip Pullman or Garth Nix won’t be disappointed.
Laura comes from a world similar to our own but for one difference: The Place. An unfathomable land filled with dreams of every kind and invisible to all but a select few: the Dreamhunters. Treated as celebrities, the Dreamhunters catch larger-than-life dreams and relay them to audiences in the magnificent dream palace, The Rainbow Opera.
Now, 15 year-old Laura and her cousin Rose are going to find out whether they are part of this prestigious group. But nothing in their darkest nightmares can prepare them for what they are about to discover. For within the Place lies a horrific secret…
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
Perhaps our greatest writer for children and young adult fiction, two-time Carnegie Medal winner Margaret Mahy, this book won the 2005 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association. Essentially it’s a love story, but not as you’ve ever experienced it before. It’s brainy, surprising, endearing, and really, really worth a read!
Determined to satisfy her curiosity about her unknown father, eighteen-year-old Angela May embarks on an emotional journey that shapes and forever alters the way she looks at herself, her unconventional mother, and her devoted friend Tycho. Reprint.
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
A writer of predominantly fantasy and historical fiction, Sheryl Jordan’s books have heart and soul. The Raging Quiet, a fantasy novel, introduces us to outsider Marnie, a young widow living in an isolated medieval community. Her only friends are a priest and a weird, "mad" youth called Raven, who she realizes is not mad at all, but deaf. When she teaches him "hand words" they are both suspected of witchcraft and find themselves under attack. It’s a book that pierces your heart and stays with you for a long time afterward.
OUTSIDERS Widowed just two days after her unwilling marriage to a man twice her age, Marnie finds herself an outsider in the remote seaside village of Torcurra. Spurned by the townsfolk who suspect her involvement in her husband's death, she has only two friends: the local priest and the madman known as Raver, even more of an outcast than Marnie herself. Marnie makes a remarkable discovers about Raver, whom she renames Raven, and the two forge a deep bond that begins to heal her own bruised heart. But the suspicious villagers see Raven's transformation as evidence of witchcraft, and suddenly…
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
This book for younger YA’s has some of
the creepiest villains you’ll ever meet and knuckle-biting tension as the
heroes are chased by the evil Wilberforces, slug-like shapeshifters who live
under Auckland’s extinct volcanoes. Their goal is the destruction
of the world and only red-haired twins Rachel and Theo Matheson can stop them,
with the help of the strange Mr. Jones, who helps the twins unleash their
supernatural power.
Beneath the extinct volcanoes surrounding the city, giant creatures are waking from a spellbound sleep that has lasted thousands of years. Their goal is the destruction of the world. Rachel and Theo Matheson are twins. Apart from having red hair, there is nothing remarkable about them - or so they think. They are horrified to discover that they have a strange and awesome destiny. Only the Matheson twins can save the world from the terror of what is under the mountain. Also available as an eBook
I’m a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand and I’ve always been drawn to stories of struggle, especially where a character fights against outside control. I started writing for the high school students I was teaching and got hooked on the YA genre. I love it partly because it crosses all genres – I can write about a 14-year-old girl trying to live in a repressive religious cult but I can also write about a 15-year-old boy who’s a champion kart driver. Karting at top level takes enormous skill as I discovered, but it also has room for dirty tricks.
I was privileged to be asked to mentor Lilia as she wrote of her life in and escape from the Gloriavale religious cult, a community of about 500 people living a secluded and strictly controlled life in a remote part of the South Island of New Zealand. Her life was like my fictional book,but on steroids. Four years after leaving the pain of knowing she’d never again see those she loved was still so acute that she wept as she wrote of it. Life inside Gloriavale fascinated and horrified me. But while Lilia gained the freedom to forge her own life she lost the closeness and love of wider family and friends. A heart-wrenching but ultimately triumphant story.
In this personal account, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking secrets of the cult, with its rigid rules and oppressive control of women. She describes her fear when her family questioned Gloriavale's beliefs and practices.
When her parents fled with their children, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice: to stay or to leave. No matter what she chose, she would lose people she loved.
In the outside world, Lilia struggled. Would she be damned to hell for leaving? How would she learn to navigate this strange place called 'the world'? And would she ever find out the truth about…
I readThe Hobbit when I was in primary school and was immediately captivated by the world of magic, dwarves, and dragons. Perhaps because in the North of England where I grew up, this world seemed often to be just around the next corner! I grew up writing, and as I learned my craft I naturally turned to books on Tolkien to see what inspired and drove him. I found that every writer on Tolkien brings a new and surprising perspective on his work, each revealing a little more of Tolkien’s genius, and inspiring me to demand ever more of myself as a writer.
A great place to start if you’re new to books on Tolkien (as opposed to books byTolkien!). David Day has written many books on Tolkien and always offers intelligent and informed insights. Although The Hobbit Companionlooks rather like a children’s book, it’s really more of a profusely-illustrated exploration of, as Day says, “the power of language,” looking at the derivations of all the key names in The Hobbit and what they reveal about Tolkien and Middle-Earth. It’s a fun and surprisingly rewarding read.
Exploring the brilliant web of verbal hocus-pocus that J.R.R. Tolkien delightedly spun in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, master hobbit investigator David Day reveals the myriad crafty puns and riddles, hidden meanings, and mythical associations beneath the saga's thrilling surface.
Intriguing to the uninitiated, enchanting to the Tolkien enthusiast, The Hobbit Companion can only enhance our enjoyment of his dark, mysterious world.
The Hobbit is also the subject of a forthcoming two-part film adaptation; Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, is the director, producer and co-writer. The two parts were filmed in…
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve always been interested in social justice and human rights, and my own writing explores such issues, including who holds the power and who exerts the control. By writing about real-world issues in a speculative future, it allows us to peel back the layers of conditioning and look at ourselves and our actions through the eyes of an outsider – which forces us to examine our best and worst human traits. I love the way speculative fiction can do this, and I love that it challenges us to do better.
The first in a trilogy, it takes a little while to adjust your reading ‘ear’ to the strange new language used, but then you’re rewarded by another great speculative cli-fi novel, with complex, layered characters, lots of tension, and a plot that will challenge you to think harder about how climate change may affect the future.
Truth died in the fires. Only through courage can it be born again. Under the iron rule of the Revelayshun, one boy discovers the truth… ‘Ty promised my ma he’d bring me up right. Bring him up to hear the rhythm beat, she said, and to feel the heartsblood warm. Not Strong – not in their way – but strong in the ways of the heart.’ When the Revelayshun murders his pa, Wil discovers through savage inquisition that he’s marked as a Heater, one of the old-time heretics who burned up the world. But Wil holds the key to a…
I'm a Frenchman with a great interest in the history of the Second World War, specializing in the correspondence of Allied soldiers. Almost 20 years of collecting WWII letters led to the publication of my first book Till Victory which was an award-winning bestseller in France, before it was released in English worldwide in 2021. I also host a podcast (Till Victory: a podcast about WWII and Peace), where I interview British and American veterans, and have made documentaries such as Red Beret & Dark Chocolate or The Missing Highlander. It's all about trying to understand what the young men who fought and died to liberate my country went through when they were my age.
Finally, a book with WWII letters that doesn’t focus exclusively on the British or Americans! Some of the soldiers are also from Australia, New Zealand, and even Germany! It helps to have a broader view of the conflict and it is very interesting to observe the differences in points of view. Moreover, this book provides the reader with beautiful photos of the letter writers, in addition to their names and stories before and after the war. Unfortunately, there is little or no historical context surrounding each letter, which is not disturbing when one is already familiar with the subject but is essential to understand all their subtleties.
Writers from 20 Allied and Axis countries are gathered in this unique collection of letters from service-men and women to their friends, families and sweethearts. WORLD WAR II LETTERS provides an unflinching perspective on the lives of those who served throughout the world - in Europe, the Pacific, Northern Africa and Asia. Wide-ranging in scope, WORLD WAR II LETTERS includes writings by officers and infantry, nurses and doctors, pilots, POWs, those injured in action, killed in combat, and those reported missing. Introductory biographies and photographs vividly capture military life before, during and after the war.
Nothing about the art of writing is more interesting to me—as both reader and writer—than the power of language to open, or to enhance, or to teach, our perceptions about life and about living in the richest emotional and thoughtful ways possible. My own Sweetbitter is my major effort at imagining in language or with language as a kind of perception. Our intuitions are immensely valuable, when we can catch hold of them; for the writer, the process of imagining and articulating is a kind of method of deepening our perceptiveness and our intuitions. My books of poems, also, are a necessary—for me—practice of the art of writing.
I *adore* Katherine Mansfield’s work. She wrote short stories, not novels.
She was still rather young when she died of tuberculosis. Her portrayals of love, family, and especially of children, are for me gloriously wonderful with insight and perceptiveness about relationships. From the New Zealand settings of many of her stories (where she was born and grew up), she emigrated to London, then to France (where she received medical treatment for TB), and Switzerland (also for treatment for TB—unsuccessful).
She seems to me a lonely genius—perceiving deeply not only other persons (of many sorts) on whom she modeled her short stories but also herself. Her seemingly idyllic childhood in NZ is perhaps the core source of her accomplishment—especially the novellas At the Bay and Prelude. But her adult life was difficult and she seems to have been uncertain about her writing, even though to me she seems a genius…
With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University.
Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923.
Kristyn Harman is an award-winning researcher who successfully completed doctoral research investigating the circumstances in which at least ninety Australian Aboriginal men were transported as convicts within the Australian colonies following their involvement in Australia’s frontier wars. She has published extensively on historical topics, and currently lectures in History at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. Having lived in both countries, Kristyn is fascinated by the different understandings that New Zealanders and Australians have of their nation’s respective pasts. She is particularly intrigued, if not perturbed, by the way in which most New Zealanders acknowledge their nation’s frontier wars, while many Australians choose to deny the wars fought on their country’s soil.
Just a few years after New Zealand became a British crown colony, armed conflict broke out in 1845 between representatives of the crown and local Māori. These frontier wars continued to be fought, particularly across New Zealand’s North Island, up until 1872. Understanding New Zealand in the present requires gaining an understanding of the New Zealand Wars. Vincent O’Malley’s book provides an insightful introduction to these complex conflicts. He explores in some detail what caused these conflicts, where and how the various battles that make up the wars were fought, and who might rightfully claim the various victories involved. O’Malley also usefully examines the consequences flowing from the New Zealand Wars. His book is richly illustrated with many evocative full color and black and white images depicting key participants, places, and moments in the New Zealand Wars.
The New Zealand Wars were a series of conflicts that profoundly shaped the course and direction of New Zealand history.Fought between the Crown and various groups of Māori between 1845 and 1872, the wars touched many aspects of life in nineteenth-century New Zealand, even in those regions spared actual fighting. Physical remnants or reminders from these conflicts and their aftermath can be found all over the country, whether in central Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, or in more rural locations such as Te Pōrere or Te Awamutu.Following on from the best-selling The Great War for New Zealand, Vincent O'Malley's new book provides…
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