New Zealand

Materials from New Zealand

The Bridge

The City is divided. The bridges gated. In Southside, the hostiles live in squalor and desperation, waiting for a chance to overrun the residents of Cityside.

Nik is still in high school but is destined for a great career with the Internal Security and Intelligence Services, the brains behind the war. But when ISIS comes recruiting, everyone is shocked when he isn’t chosen. There must be an explanation, but no one will talk about it. Then the school is bombed and the hostiles take the bridges. Buildings are burning, kids are dead, and the hostiles have kidnapped Sol. Now ISIS is hunting for Nik.

But Nik is on the run, with Sol’s sister Fyffe and ISIS hot on their trail. They cross the bridge in search of Sol, and Nik finds answers to questions he had never dared to ask.

The Bridge is a gritty adventure set in a future world where fear of outsiders pervades everything. A heart-stopping novel about friendship, identity, and courage from an exciting new voice in young-adult fiction.

Demolition

Illustrations and rhyming text show the enormous and powerful machines that are used to demolish a building so that a playground can be built.

Singing Down the Rain

Step into a town where all the children are friends, but a drought has made the adults so grumpy they can’t stop arguing! Only a miracle can heal this divided town. Folks are so hopeless, they almost don’t recognize that miracle when it appears as a woman who specializes in rainsongs. Yet slowly the townspeople realize that with faith they can sustain each other during the dry times, and then sing down the rain together. Joy Cowley’s lyrical text and Jan Spivey Gilchrist’s impassioned paintings create a story of a community’s struggle to believe, and to connect with each other.

Herbert

A boy never gives up hope when his little dog vanishes at sea in this suspenseful and heartwarming true-life adventure. Herbert was a small dog who lived by the sea. Everybody loved him, but the person who loved him best of all was Tim. One fine day, Herbert sets off on a boat with Tim’s father. But without warning, a storm crashes in — and so begins the biggest adventure of Herbert’s life. This stirring true story, written and illustrated by Robyn Belton, tells the remarkable tale of a young boy’s beloved dog and his real-life adventure at sea.

Kiwi Moon

Created by well-known children’s writer and illustrator Gavin Bishop, this is the story of a little white kiwi. When he is born his mother doesn’t recognise him because he’s not brown. Little Kiwi looks to the moon as his mother instead because it is white and bright and round. In the background of this story we see the changing times of a nearby pa. Through illustrations only we see intertribal warfare, the death of the chief, English soldiers arriving and then the burning of the pa. This fire spreads and the two stories become one as the white kiwi’s habitat is razed to the ground.On the surface this is a very simple story but it also contains themes of intertribal warfare, European colonisation of New Zealand, Maori/Pakeha relations, and conservation. There is a lot to savour on each page – with Gavin’s stunning illustrations of the main kiwi story, the on-going images of the pa, plus close-ups of insects and plants.

A Rose for the Anzac Boys

The story starts in 1915. Midge Macpherson is at school in England, having been sent there from New Zealand after her father’s death. Her brothers are both serving in the war; her younger brother was last heard of at the Gallipoli campaign earlier that year. Her cousins are serving in the British army. Keen to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort, Midge and her school friends, Ethel and Anne, start up a canteen behind the front in France. Anne, daughter of English aristocracy, can’t wait to escape her inevitable future of being married off to someone ‘suitable’, and Ethel, a Yorkshire lass, six foot tall and built like a rugby player, isn’t exactly debutante material.

As the war goes on, the girls start to see the consequences of the ‘noble cause’ they’re supporting, graphically illustrated by letters from Midge’s brother Dougie, her aunt Lallie (who is running a hospital ward in Alexandria), and a couple of Australians also serving on the front, Gordon Marks and Harry Harrison. Midge, resourceful for her years, is ‘borrowed’ by the ambulance service, thus witnessing at close hand the carnage of the battlefields, and hearing the stories of those who come back. She sings songs to the dying, learns to tolerate hit-and-miss anaesthesia and twelve-hour shifts, and meets some remarkable people. She accepts a birthday gift of a drawing, done by a blinded soldier, of a vase of roses. And, on her return to New Zealand, discovers that her world has changed, and she must seek out her future in Australia.