New Zealand/Aetearoa's most prestigious literary award are set to change sponsors next year with New Zealand Post taking on responsibility. Pernod Ricard New Zealand (formerly Montana Wines) is ending 13 years of sponsoring the awards at this year's ceremony in the Auckland War Memorial Museum on July 27. So, a hearty thanks to them for their patronage over the years and all hail New Zealand Post who are stepping in.
Possibly a tad clumsy , the 'New Zealand Post New Zealand Book Awards'. - might need some work. Tragic wonders whether we will see a merging of the grown-up awards and NZ Post sponsored Children's and Young Adult Awards a bit further down the track? Now that would be a ginormous award night night of nights.
Anyhow, the 2009 finalist have been posted with many books spread over eleven categories. Full list and book details below. Links to Fishpond New Zealand data-base for more information. The category links are connected to Tragic's NZ Aetearoa Book Awards website (coding challenge) so don't be surprised if you get whisked off into cyberspace.
The rather unconnected cartoon mash-up (doing them keeps Tragic sane), was prompted by a conversation with a fellow train passenger. The charming young man was reading an ebook on his lap top whilst Tragic was reading a hard-back copy of the vastly entertaining (and admittedly weighty)
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. Seeing Tragic engrossed in the book the lad opened up a chat by sharing the fact that along with his CDs (swapping to all MP3's) he was also getting rid of his physical book collection in favour of ebooks. He claimed an environmental motivation and felt he was saving trees. Whilst Tragic appreciated his moral stance and the Zen aspect of his minimalist approach to clutter, the thought of life without caressing a book each evening was just too much to bear.
Montana New Zealand Book Award Finalists
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FICTION
The Crocus Hour by Charlotte Randall (Penguin Group New Zealand).
The first half of this new novel is set in Crete in 1981. The narrator is a young man who has come to a small, religious village for a holiday. In the main village cafe, he meets a New Zealand man, Henry Davis, who befriends him. Henry Davis soon reveals that his daughter Sally had gone missing in the village in 1979. Over a period of weeks, Henry slowly builds up a picture of his daughter and her friend Jane and explores the baffling circumstances of Sally's disappearance. He escorts the narrator to various parts of the island, More 
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (Victoria University Press).
A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power.The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance, and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. More
The 10pm Question by Kate de Goldi (Longacre Press)
Frankie Parsons is twelve going on old man, an apparently sensible, talented boy with a drumbeat of 
worrying questions steadily gaining volume in his head: Are the smoke alarm batteries flat? Does the cat,and therefore the rest of the family, have worms? Will bird flu strike and ruin life as we know it? Is the Kidney-shaped spot on his chest actually a galloping cancer? Only Ma takes seriously his catalogue of persistent queries. But it is Ma who is the cause of the most worrying question of all, the one that Frankie can never bring himself to ask. Then the new girl arrives at school and has questions of her own: relentless, unavoidable questions. So begins the unravelling of Frankie Parsons's carefully controlled world. More
Acid Song by Bernard Beckett(Longacre Press).
It's election day in contemporary New Zealand. A young father confronts a teenage burglar. A psychologist's political 
stand threatens to see him driven from the university community. A staffroom argument flares up - does a play-ground fight warrant a student's expulsion? A young girl sets about mending her broken heart, a skinhead riot erupts and Richard, the biology lecturer at the heart of this simmering forty-eight hours, must deal with the secret which compels them all, unknowingly, to the same conclusion.
In Acid Song, an absorbing and darting novel, a varied cast of characters is linked by chance and circumstance. With a powerful, addictive intensity Bernard Beckett composes a corrosive song of our times. More
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins (Allen & Unwin).
A chilling gothic tale about a gorgeous young wife's descent into madness, from a rising literary star.
When Tom moves with his wife, Ann, from their tiny Camden flat into a large house in Hackney, he feels as if it's the start of the rest of their life together. Deeply in love, and with a baby on the way, Tom thinks everything is finally coming together. He and Ann anticipate the arrival of the baby, as Ann, particularly galvanized, spends hours cleaning and reorganizing the house, and sitting up all night talking with a renewed passion about life, love, and art. But there is a darker side to this new fervor, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who--Tom soon realizes--may not exist at all. More
POETRY
Get Some by Sonja Yelich (Auckland University Press).
Sonja Yelich's new collection is a daring departure from the award- winning Clung. It follows an American marine, Edgar, serving in Iraq, and the responses of his family back home to his tour of 'doody'. Yelich vividly contrasts his life with his family's, and serves up a whirlwind of perspectives on the war and contemporary American life from The Sopranos to Black Hawk Down, YouTube to SUVs. The narrative of Edgar and his family begins to fragment through the book as the horror of war deepens - a marine loses a leg and a plane 'breaks its nose on / Poor visibility in summer'. Yelich, highlighting the confusion of war, leaves a reader guessing as to Edgar's eventual fate. Chilling, funny, deeply sad and immensely thought-provoking, get some is the work of a writer pushing the capacities of language to express the potential of violence to erupt in everyday life.
More The Lakes of Mars by Chris Orsman (Auckland University Press).
The Lakes of Mars is a stunning new collection of poems by Chris Orsman that follow on from his most recent book, South: An Antarctic Journey, a sequence about Captain Scott's final expedition to Antarctica. These new poems are a characteristic mix of thoughtful reflection and precise imagery of landscape and object. Chris Orsman captures 'the plainness of life' with a visual clarity, but always pushes his descriptions further, broadening the poems 'into intellectual and moral meaning'. He is also particularly good at vividly recreating historical moments, while evoking the gifts and loss of the past. The first part of The Lakes of Mars encompasses the Wellington hills; a wonderful long poem of the camera and its nostalgia, read more
The Rocky Shore by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press).
The six long poems which make up The Rocky Shore were written over the course of six years. Together, theyare as much autobiographical essay as long poem, and Jenny Bornholdt's most significant 
achievement to date.
Jenny Bornholdt is a poet and anthologist. Born in Lower Hutt in 1960, she holds a BA in English Literature and a Diploma in Journalism. She attended Bill Manhire’s original composition course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1984.
She is the author of a number of collections of poetry including Summer (April 2003) and These Days (2000) and Miss New Zealand: Selected Poems which was published in 1997 and this contains work from her four earliest collections of poetry This Big Face (1988), Moving House (1989), Waiting Shelter (1991) and How We Met (1995). She was Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 2005–2007.
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BIOGRAPHY
Rita Angus: An Artist's Life by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press).
Rita Angus was a pioneer of modern painting during the 1930s and 1940s who went on to become one of New Zealanda??s leading 20th century artists. Today, more than 100 years after her birth, works such as Rutu (1951) Central Otago (1940) and Portrait of Betty Curnow (1941-1942) have become national icons, while Angus is perhaps New Zealand's best-loved painter. Yet the story of her life remains little known and poorly understood, and until now little has been written about it. In this revelatory and subtle book, Jill Trevelyan traces Angus's entire life, from her childhood in Napier and Palmerston North to her death in Wellington in 1970. Drawing on a wealth of newly available archives and letters, she brings to life Rita Angus the person: highly articulate and full of zest, intellectually curious and forthright in her attitudes and emotions, powerfully committed to her pacifist and feminist beliefs and dedicated, above all, to life as an artist. Rita Angus: An 
Artist's Life is generously illustrated with more than 150 artworks and private photographs to bring Angus - her private struggles and public reputation and her greatest legacy, her art - to complex, colourful life. More
The Love School: Personal Essays by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press).
The Love School collects more than twenty years of Elizabeth Knox’s non-fiction. These frank and revealingessays and talks tell the story of her writing’s beginnings, while later pieces give insights into the life of an author, and touch on the imaginative roots of Knox’s novels. More
Heaphy by Iain Sharp (Auckland University Press).
Born in England c1820, Englishman Charles Heaphy - the first 'New Zealander' to win the Victoria Cross, the first European to explore the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island and the most distinguished 19th-century landscape painter in that country is, by any measure, a central figure in colonial history. In this engaging book, lavishly illustrated with Heaphy's paintings, drawings and maps, author Iain Sharp reveals the story of Heaphy's life and art.From his earliest surviving watercolour of birdlife in the Marlborough Sounds in August 1839 to his last known sketch on the back of an envelope, showing Maori witnesses at a Native Land Court hearing in December 1879, Charles Heaphy's paintings and drawings represent a remarkable visual diary of settler life read more
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ENVIRONMENT
A Continent on the Move: New Zealand Geoscience into the 21st Century edited by Ian Graham (Geological Society of New Zealand).
Adrift in the South Pacific Ocean, separated from the rest of the world by vast distances and blessed with some of the most varied and spectacular natural landscapes on Earth, New Zealand is rather special. Generations of geoscientists have developed an increasing understanding of what makes New Zealand geologically unique and why. Highlights of this research, including many discoveries of global significance, are presented in this book. A Continent on the Move explains what makes New Zealand tick geologically, and illustrates 
the ways that geoscience research can make this country a better place in which to live. This book will be a stimulating addition to any read more
Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany by Brian Turner (Random House New Zealand).
Brian Turner is one of this country's best-known and best-loved poets and also one of its most determined conservationists. In this beautifully illustrated anthology he brings together both old and new essays, columns, articles and poetry that concentrate on the wild places and outdoor pursuits he loves and of which he is such an unabashed, articulate and passionate champion. More
Albatross: Their World, Their Ways by Tui De Roy and Mark Jones (David Bateman).
The albatross is a creature of legend, poetry and dreams. But today, over three-quarters of albatross species are edging towards extinction. This book is a celebration of these amazing birds, featuring photographs by award-winning wildlife photographer Tui De Roy, the latest research by leading international experts and a factual natural history. More
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HISTORY
First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking by David Veart (Auckland University Press).
'First catch your Weka', the explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage andonion and roast it on a stick. In that simple way began a great tradition of New Zealand cooking, from Heaphy to the Edmonds Cookery Book, Alison Holst, Hudson and Halls, and the meal on your plate today. In this book, David Veart tells the story of what New Zealanders cooked through the recipes we used. Analysing the crusty deposits and grubby thumb prints on a century and a half of cook books, Veart chronicles the extraordinary foods that we have loved: from boiled calf's head to the Bill Rowling cake, Irish famine soup to tinned kidneys with mushrooms. First Catch your Weka illuminates the basic elements that make New Zealand cooking distinctive and reveals how our cuisine and our culture have changed. Throughout that history, Veart finds a people who frequently first liked to catch their weka - building a meal out of oysters taken from the rocks, vegetables from the garden and a 
lamb from the neighbouring farm. By telling the history of what we ate, First Catch your Weka tells us a great deal about who we have been. More
Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand by Chris Brickell (Random House New Zealand).
What are the historical changes through which the modern gay New Zealander has emerged? If he has not always been with us, then who preceded him? A landmark publication, this first-ever New Zealand gay male history combines lively and engaging scholarship with a remarkable collection of images. Chris Brickell tells the evolving story of New Zealand gay men through the lives of clerks, labourers, shop assistants, soldiers, actors and writers of all classes, and he shows that our erotic past was vibrant, complex and often surprising. With over 300 fascinating images, many never seen previously. More
Buying the Land, Selling the Land by Richard Boast (Victoria University Press).
This is a study of Crown Maori land policy and practice in the period 1865–1929. The story the book tells is in many ways a bleak and grim one of a tsunami of Crown purchasing crashing over a people who were in very difficult circumstances. Yet Buying the Land, Selling the Land is something of a reaction to the ‘the-Crown-has-been-very-naughty’ school of New Zealand history. Alienation of land by sale requires two parties, a buyer and a seller. This book is about both. More
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ILLUSTRATIVE
Peter Peryer: Photographer by Peter Simpson with photos by Peter Peryer (Auckland University Press).
Peter Peryer is one of New Zealand's leading contemporary photographers. Peryer is also an innovative photographer, constantly refining his photographic practice, notably with his embrace of digital photography from 1998 and increasing interest in colour. Peter Peryer: Photographer includes a section of eighty photographs, the largest body of Peryer's work yet assembled, personally selected by the photographer. A wide-ranging introduction to Peryer's work, by Peter Simpson, and an illustrated autobiographical essay by Peryer himself are also included. Interested in doubles, pattern and repetition, problems of scale, the surreal and the grotesque, Peryer's work most often focuses on the 'thingness' of his subjects and objects.
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Certain Words Drawn by John Reynolds (Random House New Zealand).
John Reynolds is one of New Zealand's most significant and most admired contemporary artists. An Arts Laureate, his Cloud was last year a centrepiece of the Sydney Bienale, at which he was New Zealand's representative, a rare honour for a New Zealand painter. Certain Words Drawn brings together examples of his recent work and practice in a stunning book designed by Arch McDonnell of InHouse Design. Magnificently packaged, this book is a limited edition of 1500 copies only, each numbered and signed by the artist. Edited by University of Auckland professor Laurence Simmons, the book is generously laden with images and contains essays by interalia Frank Stark, Andrew Clifford, Tessa Laird, Nicholas Stevens, Dianne Bardsley, Ian Wedde Shirley and Roger Horrocks, and Leigh Davis
Len Castle: Making the Molecules Dance by Len Castle (Lopdell House Gallery).
Len Castle’s potting career, which started in 1947, spans the emergence, flourishing and subsequent transformation of the craft movement of the 20th century. His work epitomises its vitality, its deeply indigenous origins and the sophistication of its craftsmanship and artistry. He has been described as a ‘national treasure’.
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LIFESTYLE AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand's Culinary History by Helen Leach (Otago University Press). dessert cake said to emulate the lightness of the famous ballerina, Anna Pavlova), the real story of the ballerina's
While Australians and New Zealanders have long debated which country invented the pavlova (a large meringue visit to the Antipodes and the emergence of three different pavlovas was neglected. The contributions of a gelatine manufacturer, a Dunedin spinster, and numerous other New Zealand housewives are all revealed in this fascinating contribution to food history. The book shows the evolution of the three pavlova types, that their recipes have never been set in stone, and that creative and innovative cooks have played the most important roles in transforming a fashionable afternoon tea cake into an iconic dessert. More
Ladies, A Plate: Traditional Home Baking by Alexa Johnston (Penguin Group New Zealand).
There is a good chance you can remember a time when the family cake tins were always full of biscuits, slices, fruit loaves and cakes baked by mothers, aunts and grandmothers. And, of course, home-made sponges, ginger loaves, lamingtons, custard squares were an integral part of all special occasions - whether it was a birthday, a christening, a wedding or a wake. In Ladies, A Plate, Alexa Johnston looks back to this gentler time and shares her favourite traditional New Zealand recipes. An avid collector of community cookbooks, Alexa also writes about the history of some New Zealand baking classics, showing how our favourite recipes evolved over time. This gorgeous book contains over ninety recipes and will be treasured by every kitchen enthusiast, whether in your twenties or your nineties. More
Art Icons of New Zealand: Lines in the Sand by Oliver Stead (David Bateman).
Certain images, art objects and art styles have embedded themselves in the consciousness of many New Zealanders. But why and how have they become part of our visual vocabulary? Oliver Stead has had the difficult task of not only selecting 40 of these iconic works but putting them into a context of New Zealand art history.
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REFERENCE AND ANTHOLOGY
The Painted Garden in New Zealand Art by Christopher Johnstone (Random House New Zealand).
From James Busby on, European settlers made gardens from the moment they set foot on New 
Zealand soil, and of course Maori had extensive cultivations of kumara around their kainga. Many settler gardens were matters of survival - kitchen gardens on which families were reliant - but as individual circumstances allowed and prosperity spread, many gardens became increasingly ambitious and extensive. It is hardly surprising that artists were drawn to depicting them, as they have from the 1820s right through to the present day. This collection of 100 delightful works, selected by Christopher Johnstone, author of the highly successful LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS OF NEW ZEALAND: A JOURNEY FROM NORTH TO SOUTH, tells the story of our gardening history as it intersected with our cultural and artistic development. Beautifully packaged and carefully researched, it is a treasure trove of magnificent images, many of gardens now lost to the passage of time. More
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 5: 1922 edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford University Press).
The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different - if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived? Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). More
Collected Poems 1951-2006 by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press).
This Collected Poems includes the work of fourteen volumes of poetry, from Stead's first collection, Whether the Will is Free, to The Black River of 2007. In addition, it reprints 22 early previously uncollected poems that date from 1951 to 1961. Annotated by the author, the Collected Poems illustrates more than fifty years of the range and ambition of Stead's verse, in which the world always looks 'hard / at the word and the / word at the world'. More
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NZ SOCIETY OF AUTHORS (NZSA)
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS FINALISTS
FICTION
The Year of the Shanghai Shark by Mo Zhi Hong (Penguin Group New Zealand).
Hai Long is a teenager living in the Chinese city of Dalian. It's the year of the SARS epidemic in China. This is a modern China that's eye-catchingly contemporary. Hai Long and his mates drink Coca-Cola and eat American fast food. They watch American NBA basketball on television and argue whether Michael Jordan is the greatest player ever. They go to English language lessons and hilariously mock Karl, their hopelessly naive Canadian teacher, who drinks too much beer and is just dying to get away to Thai beaches to hang 
out with German babes. This is also the year in which Hai Long leaves school to learn the unlikely trade of his uncle. 'Uncle' has many books, but he's actually a highly successful professional pick-pocket who specialises in robbing dazed foreigners - Koreans and Japanese as well as Europeans - and makes special trips to Beijing for the purpose. More
Misconduct by Bridget van der Zijpp (Victoria University Press).
Misconduct is a moving novel about the possibility of reinvention, the sweet and sour taste of revenge, and a woman's search for friendship and love. More
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (Victoria University Press).
A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power.The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance, and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. More
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Everything Talks by Sam Sampson (Auckland University Press).
"Everything Talks" is AUP's first collection of poetry by up-and-coming Auckland poet Sam Sampson. Organised in sections ('An Arena of Reflected Caches', 'Mirror Mirror', 'Orpheus at Whatipu', 'Frisson', 'The Dirty Monk', 'The Deep End'), "Everything Talks" has a resonant overall cohesiveness; the poems are original and contradictory: earthy, cryptic, exquisite in turn. Sampson has an ear for the lilting phrase, and his poems - 'attuned to the day's inflections' - have a gentle ebb and flow, which is often echoed visually by the way the poems are laid out upon the page. This tidal lyricism is never fragile or overly lavish and often a marvellous stanza is undercut - 'sounds are askew' - by a laconic expression or surprisingly forthright final image. More
The Propaganda Poster Girl by Amy Brown (Victoria University Press).
Insightful and intelligent, this compelling collection of poems touches on themes of memory, travel, and the unconscious. With images and scenes carrying the burden of disclosure, these pieces create a thoughtful and provocative narrative along with a palpable and engaging outside world. More
The World's Fastest Flower by Charlotte Simmonds (Victoria University Press).
NON-FICTION
First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking by David Veart (Auckland University Press).
'First catch your Weka', the explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage and onion and roast it on a stick. In that simple way began a great tradition of New Zealand cooking, from Heaphy to the Edmonds Cookery Book, Alison Holst, Hudson and Halls, and the meal on your plate today. In this book, David Veart tells the story of what New Zealanders cooked through the recipes we used. Analysing the crusty deposits and grubby thumb prints on a century and a half of cook books, Veart chronicles the extraordinary foods that we have loved: from boiled calf's head to the Bill Rowling cake, Irish famine soup to tinned kidneys with mushrooms. First Catch your Weka illuminates the basic elements that make New Zealand cooking distinctive and reveals how our cuisine and our culture have changed. Throughout that history, Veart finds a people who frequently first liked to catch their weka - building a meal out of oysters taken from the rocks, vegetables from the garden and a lamb from the neighbouring farm. By telling the history of what we ate, First Catch your Weka tells us a great deal about who we have been. More
Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand by Chris Brickell (Random House New Zealand).
What are the historical changes through which the modern gay New Zealander has emerged? If he has not always been with us, then who preceded him? A landmark publication, this first-ever New Zealand gay male history combines lively and engaging scholarship with a remarkable collection of images. Chris Brickell tells the evolving story of New Zealand gay men through the lives of clerks, labourers, shop assistants, soldiers, actors and writers of all classes, and he shows that our erotic past was vibrant, complex and often surprising. With over 300 fascinating images, many never seen previously. More
Nga Tama Toa, The Price of Citizenship - C Company 28 (Maori) Battalion 1939-1945 by Monty Soutar (David Bateman).
The fascinating story of C Company, Maori Battalion told through personal recollections, eyewitness accounts, numerous anecdotes and fantastic photographs. At times heart-rending, at times heart-warming, this impressive book captures the special 'spirit' of the Maori Battalion - an amazing story that documents the stories of those who were actually there. More
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