"As a child, Natsuki doesn't fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to...

This poignant novel, beautifully translated by Simon Beattie, was, in Lampe's words, "born into a regime where it could not breathe;" he hoped that one day it might rise again. It has no one main character, but evokes the sensations and impressions of a sultry September evening on the waterfront of Bremen, with its charm and tenderness, squalor and lust. It contains a stream of images with many characters: children, old and young people, men and women,...

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION AT THE 2023 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS

A dazzling portrayal of humanity and the natural world that perfectly balances violence and humor

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. "If it keeps me awake," says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, "I'll have to wring its neck." But with Tama come new possibilities

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An encounter with the mysterious little old man leaves an unassuming boy with an unfathomable message about a prior life as well as an ominous warning about an ancient foe. In the process of recounting his angelic past, he embarks on a journey that will cost him everything. Finding the magic books of Belteshazzar, the man tells his story and the secret of a resurrection machine, an ancient technology that will literally open a portal to another dimension. While...

At only fourteen, Bea is the local superhero of Elgar City known as Baron in costume, and the responsibility is already pressing down on her. Things only get worse, when her archnemesis from afar, The Prosecutor, meets her face to face for the first time. As they interact, the supervillain seems to take a keen, unusual interest in her and begins to act out unexpectedly, seemingly to mess with her head. Meanwhile, as if she wasn't already maneuvering...

In The Island Chronicles Book 1, Conscious, Christopher, whose name has been changed to William, is drawn by the music to the mysterious woman, Eleutheria, who lives in the house with the thatched roof overlooking Bourani Cove and the ancient lime kiln which still burns hot for those who know how and where to look. There, she tells him about trapping time in the old tower, inadvertently creating the dragon, and how he must contain the monster while...

Fleeing war and the death of her family, Eve has carefully constructed a new life for herself in London. Yet she is troubled by vivid, disturbing dreams, symptoms of her traumatic past, which intrude increasingly on her daily life. As she is drawn further into her dream world, she finds herself caught up in a fresh battle for survival. A dark, lyrical fantasy about healing and reconnecting with the full richness of the self.

On an spring afternoon in 1978 in the loft of a church outside Cambridge, England, an organ tuner named Malory loses his virginity to a dyslexic math genius named Louiza. When Louiza disappears, Malory follows her trail to Rome. There, the quest to find his love gets sidetracked when he discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, given by Charlemagne to the Jews of eighth-century France. In the midst of a Rome reeling from the kidnappings...

Lovely and her dad would always take a walk in the park, but every time they would take this walk, Lovely always noticed her dad would stop in front of an enormous tree. So being the curious girl she was, she asked her dad why he would always look at that tree. Then her dad told her to look at the very top of this tree. There she saw the most beautiful and majestic thing she had ever seen. What she saw was many, many birds of all kinds on the tree....

In the magnificent conclusion to Nancy Springer's Sea King Trilogy, a mad prince confronts peril and dark magic on a desperate quest to find a lost god in a dying world They were three, united to hold together a world that was coming apart: Rad Korridun, the sea king, who died three times but lived still; Dannoc, the mad prince of the Red Hart tribe, bonded mind and heart to Kor; and Tassida, the beautiful mystery, a rebellious daughter of the death...