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Recommended books (25)
Travel the world without leaving your chair. The target of the Read Around The World Challenge is to read at least one book written by an author from each and every country in the world. All books that are listed here as part of the "Read Around Oceania Challenge" were written by authors from New Zealand. Find a great book for the next part of your reading journey around the world from this book list. The following popular books have been recommended so far.

1.

After The Fall by Charity Norman EN

Rating: 4     3 Votes
Description:
In the quiet of a New Zealand winter's night, a rescue helicopter is sent to airlift a five-year-old boy with severe internal injuries. He's fallen from the upstairs veranda of an isolated farmhouse, and his condition is critical. At first, Finn's fall looks like a horrible accident; after all, he's prone to sleepwalking. Only his frantic mother, Martha McNamara, knows how it happened. And she isn't telling. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Tragedy isn't what the McNamara family expected when they moved to New Zealand. For Martha, it was an escape. For her artist husband Kit, it was a dream. For their... continue
Genre
Recommended: 17 May 2018

2.
Daughter of Gloriavale

Daughter of Gloriavale by Lilia Tarawa EN

0 Ratings
Description:
In this personal account, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking secrets of a small Christian cult in New Zealand, 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... continue
Recommended: 06 Jan 2023

3.

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier EN

Rating: 4.5     105 Votes
Description:
Sorcha, the seventh child and only daughter of Lord Colum, faces the difficult task of having to save her family from its enemies, who have bewitched her father and six older brothers while forcing her to choose between the life she has always known and a special love. Reprint.
Genre
Recommended: 09 Apr 2022

4.

Faces In The Water by Janet Frame EN

Rating: 3.5     8 Votes
Description:
'Janet Frame's luminous words are the more precious because they were snatched from the jaws of the disaster of her early life . . . and yet to read her is no more difficult than breathing' Hilary Mantel When Janet Frame's doctor suggested that she write about her traumatic experiences in mental institutions in order to free herself from them, the result was Faces in the Water, a powerful and poignant novel. Istina Mavet descends through increasingly desolate wards, with the threat of leucotomy ever present. As she observes her fellow patients, long dismissed by hospital staff, with humour and... continue
Recommended: 07 Mar 2022

5.
Genesis

Genesis by Bernard Beckett EN

Rating: 4     65 Votes
Description:
Set on a remote island in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden world, this bold and ingenious thriller questions what it means to be human as philosophical questions collide with technology.
Recommended: 08 Mar 2023

6.
Gideon the Ninth

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir EN

Rating: 3.5     47 Votes
Description:
Gideon the Ninth is the most fun you'll ever have with a skeleton. The Emperor needs necromancers. The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman. Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as necromantic skeletons. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy. Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of serv... continue
Recommended: 08 May 2023

7.

Island of the Lost : An Extraordinary Story of Survival at the Edge of the World by Joan Druett EN

0 Ratings
Description:
“Riveting.” —The New York Times Book Review Hundreds of miles from civilization, two ships wreck on opposite ends of the same deserted island in this true story of human nature at its best—and at its worst. It is 1864, and Captain Thomas Musgrave’s schooner, the Grafton, has just wrecked on Auckland Island, a forbidding piece of land 285 miles south of New Zealand. Battered by year-round freezing rain and constant winds, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, another... continue
Recommended: 22 Oct 2022

8.

Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff EN

Rating: 4     7 Votes
Description:
Life as a Maori in present day New Zealand, chronicling their poverty, their alcoholism and their despair. The narrator is a Maori woman who has nothing but contempt for Maori men--warriors who degenerated into lazy bums.
Genre
Recommended: 04 Sep 2022

9.
Overkill

Overkill by Vanda Symon EN

Rating: 4     4 Votes
Description:
First published in New Zealand by Penguin Books (NZ) in 2007.
Recommended: 31 Mar 2023

10.

Potiki by Patricia Grace EN

Rating: 3.6     5 Votes
Description:
'Provocative, compassionate and beautiful' - Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate A moving story of a Maori community's fight for survival, from one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that binds the land and the sea, a small Maori community live, work, fish, play and tell stories of their ancestors. But something is changing. The prophet child toko can sense it. Men are coming, with dollars and big plans to develop the area for tourism. As their ancestral land becomes threatened, the people must unite in a battle for survival. Weaving... continue
Recommended: 08 Oct 2022


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