An historical, pastoral, satirical, scientifical romance, with mustelids! A young man out poaching. A beautiful maiden in a mysterious house. A perilous voyage to distant islands. All the ingredients of a highly coloured Victorian romance are played out in the context of the great colonial experiment. Exotic species travelled back to stock the collections of Europe while useful species were dispatched to found new colonies in the antipodes. Walter Allbones really existed. So did his ferrets. From these facts, Fiona Farrell has spun a delicate, satirical fantasy about human folly and the perils attendant on disturbing the subtle balance of nature.

A provocative and insightful exploration of rebuilding our homes, communities and cities after their devastation. Where are we? How did we get here? Where do we go now? From nineteenth-century attempts to create Utopias to America’s rustbelt, from Darwin’s study of worms to China’s phantom cities, this work ranges widely through history and around the world. It examines the evolution of cities and of Christchurch in particular, looking at its swampy origins and its present reconstruction following the recent destructive earthquakes. And it takes us to L’Aquila in Italy to observe another shaken city. Farrell writes as a citizen caught up in a devastated city in an era when political ideology has transformed the citizen to ‘an asset, the raw material on which . . . empire makes its profit’. In a hundred tiny pieces, she comments on contentious issues, such as the fate of a cathedral, the closure of schools, the role of insurers, the plans for civic venues. Through personal observation, conversations with friends, a close reading of everything from the daily newspaper to records of other upheavals in Pompeii and Berlin, this dazzling book explores community, the love of place and, ultimately, regeneration and renewal.

Animal Satire presents a cultural history of animal satire, a critically neglected but persistent presence in the history of cultural production, in which animals expose human folly while the strategies of satire expose the folly of human-animal relations. Highlighting the teeming animal presences across the history of satirical expression from Aristophanes to Twitter, with chapters on key works of literature, drama, film, and a plethora of satirical media, Animal Satire reveals the rich rhetorical significance of animality in powering the politics of satire from ancient and medieval through modern and contemporary times. More pressingly, the book makes the case for the significance of satire for understanding the real-world implications of rhetoric about animals in ongoing struggles for justice. By gathering both critical and creative examples from representative media forms, historical periods, and continents, this volume aims to enrich scholarship on the history of satire as well as empower creative practitioners with ideas about its practical applications today.

A mix of poetry and prose, this compilation by New Zealand's Fiona Ferrell is simultaneously a memoir, a meandering travel book, and a poetry collection. Demonstrating how a natural disaster can turn a life upside down in an instant, this book consists of four essays about walking, interrupted by poems about the Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath. Funny, timely, and deeply personal, it will resonate with a wide range of readers due to its references to France, Dunedin, Christchurch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, and Voltaire.

A fabulous multi-levelled novel, shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards. Clare Lacey is on a quest. In Ireland to attend an art history conference, she sets out to find her father who walked out one day to buy a packet of cigarettes when she was a child, and disappeared. She is urged on her way by chance encounters: with a woman in a high tower, a blind man at a crossroads, a singer whose song she does not understand . . . Clues lie all around on a labyrinth of walls - but the final clue lies deep within. With Irish roots and a nod to the Irish classic, The Year of the Hiker by John B. Keane, this is a contemporary novel about inheritance, belief, art, love . . . and limestone.

Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. Skinny Louie, daughter of Shanghai Lil, has a baby in the Begonia House on the day of the royal visit. Maura finds the baby and takes it home. Tia grows up with magical powers into the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. The Skinny Louie Book won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a different, slower rhythm. And beneath them all, the planet moves to its own immense geological time. With insight, wide-ranging knowledge and humour, this novel explores the same territory as its non-fiction twin, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire. Writing in a city devastated by major earthquakes, Fiona Farrell rebuilds a brilliant, compelling and imaginative structure from bits and pieces salvaged from one hundred years of history. A lot has happened. This is how it might have felt. 'It's a work of incredible research and incredible scope and incredible feeling . . . it's really wonderful. It think we will look back at these two books [Decline and Fall on Savage Street and The Villa at the Edge of Empire] and think of them as being very important in our local literary history as marking time and place and moment and feeling; it's a wonderful piece of art.' - Louise O'Brien, Radio NZ 'It's so vast, it shouldn't work; but it does. Primarily this is because, rather than anchoring her text to dry, historical minutiae, Farrell chooses to ground it to people, particularly family. So, as well as the impressive detail made especially graceful thanks to the author's poetic skill, the narrative follows one house settled upon the titular street and its inhabitants, particularly one family, extended and diverse. As such, chapter by chapter are, like a relay team, an exercise in passing the chronological story along. . . . Wide-ranging yet intimate, poetic yet simple, of the singular home yet speaking to the complexities of city and nation, Decline and Fall on Savage Street is a remarkable read.' - Siobhan Harvey, Waikato Times

A fascinating novel of hope, love, idealism and human progress, made up of two separate stories, which can be read in isolation and yet reverberate against each other. Sometime in the 1860s, in an isolated valley on Banks Peninsula, Harry Head, "the Hermit of Hickory Bay", experimented unsuccessfully with flight. His story forms part of the exuberant blend of fact and fiction which constitutes this tale. The author takes us back to the beginnings of novel-writing, as philosophical play and serious entertainment. Think Crusoe's island, think Utopia. Twelve characters, driven by obsession, hope or the vagaries of chance, come ashore in widely different circumstances onto the same island. Once there, the game can begin. Written in two halves, this is a book to be read from either end. Begin with the past and race toward the future, or begin with the present and circle back towards the past. Time may separate the two sections yet subtle links and twisting events bring them together into a varied, intriguing and compulsive whole.

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