Victoria University Press: 93 books

Paddy Thompson, speech therapist, newspaper columnist, is fifty and happy. His dark period is behind him: a failed marriage, a career crisis. Now he lives with Helena ('the best thing that ever happened to him'), helps kids with their speech problems, and has moved his mother into the next-door apartment....

Poet, wit and controversialist, A.R.D. Fairburn was one of the best-known New Zealanders of his time. This volume represents the full range and vitality of his verse. Accompanying the well known anthology pieces such as 'The Cave' and 'A Farewell' are ballads like 'Walking on My Feet' and 'The Rakehelly Man', as well as a generous selection of his early love lyrics.

New Zealanders, while generally peaceable and tolerant people, have seldom shied away from war. Even in the current era, Anzac Day is a major event here, and the haka performed by our national rugby team is one of our most recognisable cultural exports. But throughout New Zealand's history there have...

In the silence she could hear the oncoming hum, like a large flock approaching. She didn't want to hear his story; she'd had enough of them. Tess is on the run when she's picked up from the side of the road by lonely middle-aged father Lewis Rose. With reluctance, she's drawn into his family troubles...

The story of a young boy's extarordinary summer on a beach holiday, The End of the Golden Weather is a touchstone of the New Zealand experience.

The interpersonal conflicts waged between two struggling gay couples and the children they share are charted in this tragic play about the sobering incompatibility of good intentions and the cold reality of human needs.

"The knowledge of everyone they’re about to hurt is not an element easy to breathe in. They’re the lovers. You can blame them now, if you want to. That’s your choice: this is the director’s cut."Seventeen powerful stories of contemporary New Zealand life from a writer whose penetrating gaze reveals the full experience of her characters' lives—tragic, comic, rich.

This play sets the well-known events of Jack Lovelock's Berlin Olympics in parallel with a conservative boarding school in New Zealand today.

Stranded by a South Island storm, six people usurp the stillness of an old house. As they tell the fragments of their story, a seventh voice responds: a young New Zealand serviceman who died in 1920, soon after his return from France. As the storm deepens, the hauntings of the mind and the hauntings...

Brian “Bad” Phelan, New Zealander and bomb-disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. While on vacation on the French–Italian border, he helps bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. The dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, under mysterious circumstances,...

Carla, Sharon and Duey have worked in fashion for longer than they care to remember. For them, there's nothing new under the sun. They're Generation X: tired, cynical and sick of being used.Tommy, Cal and Kurt are millennials. They've come from nowhere, but with their monied families behind them they're...

Rock musician Jed Jordan’s former fame means the events in his life have become public property. Years after ‘Captain of the Rules’ made him world famous in New Zealand, Jed is living quietly in an Auckland suburb with his family, growing peppers and recording in his home studio, when some disturbing...

The vignettes in these fresh, searing short stories, closely examine the complex male life. From a predatory act during a cross-country run in Fiordland to a doomed diving trip off Wellington's south coast, this collection combines emotional urgency with a surprising dose of humor to a great range of worlds. The result is a startlingly candid portraiture of the modern man.

One of the most successful and well-known New Zealand plays is also compelling reading on the page. The power, humour and irony of the language all serve to illustrate a penetrating analysis of New Zealand society, as seen through the lens of sport.