Unity Books x Launch

Join us for an evening to celebrate the launch of three beautiful new books from Pōneke’s Cuba Press, with the New Zealand Society of Authors.

Wonderland by Tracy Farr:

Dame Fiona Kidman said, “Wonderland … is set very close to where we both happen to live, positioned in a real life amusement park that once flourished near Miramar in the early 20th century. I am filled with wild and savage envy, as Angela Carter once wrote about a fellow writer’s new book, that I hadn’t thought of this first. Wonderland is about family, grief and loss, redemption, about women living life on their own terms, both poetic and deeply rich in scientific detail, a reflection of Farr’s own background as a noted scientist herself. It’s a masterpiece.”

Tackling the Hens by Mary McCullum:

Hens can be fun visitors, when they gossip and sunbathe and pop inside for a chat, but they can outstay their welcome and tackling them to send them home isn’t easy. They aren’t the only creatures in the pages of this book— there’s Ursula the golden-eyed cat, a leporine emperor, singing mice and all the swallows! Then there are the people who interact with them: an entomologist in love with the spiders he observes, a builder who releases a trapped mouse, a woman who attracts bees as a flower does—and Mary and the hens, of course. They remind us at every turn that life is many things at once: long and short, difficult and brilliant, sad and joyful—and, like the hens, all we can do is truck on.

My Three Rivers by Shirley Bagnall Metcalfe:

My Three Rivers is a vivid account of the challenges and satisfactions of rural life in the first part of twentieth century New Zealand on land defined by unpredictable rivers, few reliable roads and no bridges. With a sharp and often humorous eye, Shirley Bagnall Metcalfe captures the community at Thames, beside the mouth of the Waihou, where the Bagnall family owned a sawmill, and at an isolated farm on the East Coast beside the Kopuapounamu River, where she farmed with her husband until they retired by the great Waikato. Shirley wrote with a fountain pen in Warwick Jotters and her grandson Andrew Wright has transcribed her words for publication, adding photographs from family and museum archives.

There will be readings, signings, beverages, and after-hours book browsing!