Not Swinging, Swooning
‘It’s early in the morning,’ a boy writes in his diary, ‘on the first day of the first year of the most modern decade in the whole of human history. Get in the groove!’ Stevan Eldred-Grigg, the boy, is seven years old and one of the middle kids in a nuclear family in a twice-mortgaged new bungalow in a new cul-de-sac in a suburb during the Space Age. Not Swinging, Swooning is the story of the boyhood years of Stevan Eldred-Grigg, told by himself. A story about a boy’s dreams, dreads, hopes, fears and adventures. A story about elbowing and being elbowed by five brothers, three sisters, Seven Sisters, many aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, friends, teachers, foes, heroes. A story about pop songs the boy thought were groovy. And about yarns spelled by the olds. Along with other tales he was told, or told himself, about being a boy – being in a suburb – and about becoming, or trying to become, a young man in the mod optimistic hi-gloss world of the sixties of last century.
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Oracles & Miracles & Zombies
A black comedy, this story shows us how twin sisters, their sharp and shrewd mother, and many other women struggled to avoid being bitten by biters, cared gingerly for hunches who didn’t want to eat their brains (just yet), and watched as the ‘cured’ lurkers started to take their jobs.
Even during pandemics girls grow up, worry about boys, go out to work, get married, and have babies, all while trying to keep their brains safe inside their skulls. At the beginning the twins are small, fearful and helpless. By the end of the story they’re armed and ready to go after the enemy ... but who is the real enemy?
A novel about survival in extraordinary times, Oracles & Miracles & Zombies is an inspiration to women of all generations.
And the birds fled to the bush
The leaves of the books are birds. The tightly scrunched ponytails of the girls are birds. The dreadlocks of their pothead boyfriends are birds. The doilies on the windowsills are birds. The Dominion Post held by an old man becomes a flock of birds and starts to fly away. The prescriptions for the sickness beneficiaries are birds caught in the down draft. The white paper bags that held raspberry cream donuts are birds. The receipts for reconditioned tyres are birds. The posters for a d-dub concert are birds. The Jackson’s Café and Burger Bar wrappers, the Dolla $ave plastic bags, the Wainuiohine Library Teen-Zone fliers are birds.
The valley’s calm, quiet, waiting. Mrs Henderson thinks it’s earthquake weather but she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t want to make a fuss. It’s probably nothing. No one else notices it’s quiet, too quiet, until everyone does at the same moment, like at a party when everything goes silent and no one wants to be the first to speak.
All the birds take flight at the sound of Mike’s motorbike backfiring. They lift, for a moment, suspended. Everyone turns and stares. Will they fly? Will they soar? Will they scatter? Like confetti? Like polystyrene beans from a burst beanbag? Or will they all move together as one?
A rising, folding, sweeping, blossoming, murmuration? All the birds are airborne, and the whole valley holds its breath.
Making Maths Add Up - Book 1
Maggie's philosophy is Make Maths Not Suck! And she has succeeded with this colourful, fun, clear, and mathematically sound approach to teaching mathematics. Making Maths Add Up takes a revolutionary new approach to teaching maths by starting from scratch and breaking seemingly complex mathematical concepts down into their core parts, then building upon each foundation skill clearly and intuitively.
Children can jump in at the point they feel comfortable for each topic, allowing them to focus on the maths skills themselves and not arbitrary ‘levels’ and leaving room for revision, learning, and extension. It starts at the level of 2 + 2 and teaches skills that quickly make equations like 680 + 70 easy to solve. This book seamlessly incorporates algebra, word problems, and mnemonic storytelling. The relaxed, chatty style with cheerful, colourful images puts kids at ease.
Maggie's book is ideal for both the student who has (allegedly) "fallen behind" and those who are excelling and are "ahead" for their year, i.e. all levels can pick up this book, find the stage at which they feel comfortable and start working from there. Students can start at the beginning of each chapter and do the easier exercises quickly as revision or jump straight to the difficult questions.
This book encourages independent learning and has been peer-reviewed by teachers and students alike. The specialist font makes this resource accessible to all learners.
Green Grey Rain
Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It’s the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valerie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is the well-spoken son of a landed family. They already have three kids. Gilbert has just taken a job as paymaster at a coal mine. The family is about to start life in a green and black and red township on the West Coast.
A little boy is born, almost in a taxi, and named Stevan.
Green Grey Rain tells the story of the first years of that little boy. A story told by Stevan. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by Valerie – who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles. A story of working and playing, dreaming and singing, crying and laughing, hoping and wishing, bush, rain, rust, and the sooty streets of Blackball.
Pru Goes Troppo
Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had sex for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia. Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.
‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy one day in Samoa.
‘I rather think we are, darling.’
‘Oh dear.’
Pru Goes Troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of two people who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent. Among the themes explored in the story are class, gender, colonialism and neo-colonialism, ageing and belonging. And pratfalls.
Into The Woods
'A funny, painful, powerful story about the strange ways grief moves through us. Helen's path of recovery, from a bed she doesn't want to leave towards a natural world she doesn't know, is full of recognisable difficulties and unlikely connections. This frank and bracing little book has a bass note of personal tragedy but a top note of surprising joy.'
Damien Wilkins
It was during the spring the kaka arrived that I first noticed a grey warbler fledgling outside my window who couldn't get the tune quite right. He'd start singing, get a note wrong and falter, then try tentatively again. Like a child learning the recorder, I thought.
Like a child...
My Dad
My dad is a beautifully illustrated simple story about a kid and their dad. Its short, simple sentences and use of dyslexia friendly font make it suitable for young readers, but its full page colourful illustrations also make it attractive to toddlers. Great for dads and kids to read together.
This book uses a dyslexia friendly font which makes it accessible for all readers. Printed on sustainably managed stock by local printers.
The Unused Life of Tito López
A clever, hopeful, young graduate, Tito López, is poised at the entry to adulthood as well as a whole new millennium. Living in a provincial Mexican city at the turn of the 21st century he wants what most of us want … a career, love, happiness. But will he find any of them on Cerro del Calvario?
What’s up with his nunnish clever sister Angelita? Will the deer’s eye work – the amulet given by the wrinkled family workhorse, María? Who’s the mysterious blond god, Salvador?
The Unused Life of Tito López portrays the Lopez family in a way that will seem familiar to those from middle-class suburban families almost anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, readers from outside Mexico will be intrigued by the sense of other, parallel, exotic, existences in our contemporary world.
Our authors
Stevan Eldred-Grigg
‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a wonderful writer.’
Robert Jones, editor, New York
Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning writer, author of some of the best-selling works of New Zealand history and of leading New Zealand novels. His works of fiction and non-fiction explore the West Coast, Canterbury, the wider South Island and the whole of New Zealand. He also writes about Samoa, Shanghai, Mexico and Australia.
Maggie Tu
Maggie loves maths, but found maths lessons and in her school very frustrating. There were many times where she discovered she could learn more in 20 minutes of her own research than in half a term in maths class. She would often collect a little huddle of friends who also wanted to know how to not fail their next test, and would share her knowledge.
Discovering that she was a natural teacher she found her first dream job when she was 17 at a local tutoring centre. She loved it so much she ran her own volunteer sessions at the public library during the school holidays, which then expanded into running her own small side hustle all the way through her time at university.
Helen Innes
Helen is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who usually lives in a house in Naenae, sometimes on a boat in Seaview, and hardly ever but with great enthusiasm in a yurt in Wainuiomata.
She studied linguistics and psychology at Victoria University, then taught English as a second language for 20 years in Ireland, England, Japan, China, and New Zealand.
Hugh Hunter
Hugh Hunter works in the European fintech industry - history, politics and literature are his hobbies. He has lived in Asia, Spain and the UK, and now resides in Northern Europe. He has previously co-written a book on the history of New Zealand in World War II and a roleplaying game supplement for Vampire: the Masquerade.
Affie Blake
Affie Blake was born in Cork and lives in Dublin. Having worked as an educator for twenty-five years, Affie has also written three novels and a volume of poetry. Affie has lived in, amongst other places, Oxford, Paris and Hastings. Learn by Mosaic is Affie's first novel to be published.
Photo credit: Serhii Shapova
Madden Hay
Madden has worked rubbish jobs for rubbish wages in rubbish places but when someone says,
—Why don’t you just get a better job?
Madden always laughs and says,
—It’s the rubbish jobs that provide the best stories!
And collecting stories is what Madden loves best. Along with meeting awesome, crazy characters, seeing wild corners of the earth, learning how to communicate (or miscommunicate) in other languages, and having the odd drink and odd yarn or two, Madden has been known to go bush, carrying an ancient typewriter, and reappear some time later with a water stained manuscript which is then transformed, by the wonders of modern technology, into a book or two.
Anneke Gerbrands
Anneke Gerbrands studied Journalism and Communication and has done editorial work as well as graphic design. After working in newspapers she packed everything up and went overseas for a while.
Since then she has lived in the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. She has published four books in the Netherlands and is currently working on more books that will come out next year. She has published books in both Dutch and English.
Luis Luna
Luis Luna Cortez was born in 1978 in a provincial city in Mexico. He grew up in that city. Since then, he has lived in Xalapa, Puebla, Veracruz, Mérida, Cancún, Brighton, Birmingham, Maidstone, and Whangārei.
A journalist with degrees in literature and architecture, he lives today by a cenote in Quintana Roo. He wrote his first novel in idioma español mexicano which he then translated it into South-English English for publication with Piwaiwaka Press.
WELCOME
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Our illustrators
Sandra Thomson
Sandra is an award-winning artist and printmaker who drew covers for both Oracles & Miracles & Zombies, and Pru Goes Troppo.
She graduated from the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University and has exhibited wildly in New Zealand and overseas.
Ingrid Kamp
"While my outside-me was hopping jobs for years, my inside-me was always dreaming, drawing, scribbling, painting murals, telling stories, singing, writing poetry and lyrics and sometimes songs. It took me a while to get myself sorted, but here I am, currently working on more songs and a sketchbook filled with illustrations to go with them."
Ingrid loves making books and music, while having brutally deep conversations with wine and her dearest friend Anneke Gerbrands. "Anneke has tons of stories in her witty and quirky mind and I am so happy to make those visible."
Alisa Ivanova
Alisa Ivanova is a self-taught artist and an aspiring book illustrator based in Estonia.
She likes turning ideas into images and enjoys making art using traditional as well as digital mediums.
Tama McArdell
Tama is based in Newtown, Wellington where he paints in watercolour and oil, and draws in ink, charcoal, and pencil in his studio. He is a graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts in Canterbury.
Tama illustrated Helen's little book Into the Woods, with a watercolour of a ruru on the front, and an ink drawing of a woman and tūī on the back.
Mairéad Hannon
Mairéad Hannon is a Galway based abstract artist. She mainly uses ink as a medium to illustrate and has recently branched out to painting.
She has completed studies in UX design and enjoys the world of design and its many intersecting spheres.
Our Values
Independent & local
We are Aotearoa/NZ owned
and operated.
We work cooperatively, not hierarchically, with authors, illustrators, and editors to produce the best work possible.
We believe in supporting local authors, illustrators, copyeditors, designers, printers, and bookshops.
author rights
We give authors more say about the publication process.
Authors have freedom in the language they use.
Authors have a significant say over book cover illustration and design.
Censorship & controversy
We believe authors should be free to express their opinions and not have their words censored by others.
Author’s’ works should be judged by readers not by religious organisations, political organisations, states or other vested interests and institutions.
environment
We believe paper books are longer lasting and contain more sustainable and environmentally friendly materials than eBook readers do.
We plant one native tree or shrub in the Innes Bush Sanctuary for every book sold. Our books are wrapped in protective plant-based cellophane.
Our international sales are printed at the location closest to the buyer instead of shipping across long distances. We sell direct to the public at markets and online.
Reviews
'Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He’s unsettling as well as absorbing.'
David Hill on Stevan
'A funny, painful, powerful story about the strange ways grief moves through us. This frank and bracing little book has a bass note of personal tragedy but a top note of surprising joy.'
Damien Wilkins on
Into The Woods
'As a father, I have loved finding resources that help me support the education my son is getting. Maggie's teaching, and the very visual way she presents this book are everything I think every parent would love to have.'
Ben Adams on
Making Maths Add Up