2025 Ockham NZ Book Awards

It's time. Mary, an ex-cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren't falling apart, but they're watching each other—Pete with his tachycardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it's as if the people they have lost keep returning...

Hine Toa is an incredible memoir by a trailblazing voice in women's, queer, and Māori liberation movements. 'Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant' – Patricia Grace In the 1950s, a young Ngahuia is fostered by a family who believe in hard work and community. Although close to her kuia, she craves more: she wants higher education and refined living. But...

From award-winning novelist Laurence Fearnley comes an intriguing story about recovery, reflection and reconnecting with ourselves and others. Following a disastrous family holiday, Libby and Curtis make a promise: if they ever visit the West Coast of the South Island again, it will be to stay at the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel. Twenty years later, Libby is recovering from cancer...

Fibs, porkies, little white lies, absolute whoppers and criminal evasions: the ways we can deceive each other are legion. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new collection by Ōtepoti poet and writer Emma Neale, is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky—'The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie'—it combines a...

Longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards A tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect? Water will come and you think it will be soft. You think it will be smooth and find its way around your things: your houses and cars...

From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should...

A landmark account in words and pictures of Māori art, by Māori art historians—from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists. He toi whakairo, he mana tangata. Through artistic excellence, there is human dignity. In six hundred pages and with over five hundred illustrations, this volume takes us on an extraordinary voyage through Māori art—from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists...

Poorhara is the story of nineteen-year-old Erin, her older cousin Star/Whetu and an impromptu road trip taken over a few days. With the demands and heartbreaks of whanau, poverty and trauma nipping at their heels, Erin and Star trace the path back to their whenua, in the hope of salvation – something they ultimately find in each other.

Manuali'i - Bird of the Gods is an anchor to ancestors and to self. These poems are reminders of who you come from and who you are; compasses to constant new becomings. Questions for timekeepers and connections to universal powers. Being guided by messengers of the sky. Dancing on the delicate tightrope of here, the past, and an imagined future,...

Published to coincide with the reopening of the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, this substantial and handsome book examines the continuing impact of Whanganui-born and British-trained Edith Collier and her artistic legacy. In an era of growing international interest in women artists, Collier's work is finding a new audience via books, exhibitions, documentary films and other projects. Edith Collier was a...