From bestselling author Rex Pickett comes Sideways New Zealand, the next delightfully dark and funny novel in the Sideways series. Miles Raymond thought things were going relatively well. Miles, the now iconic alter ego of author Rex Pickett—who was first introduced in the critically acclaimed book Sideways and its award-winning movie adaptation—resurfaces on the South Island of New Zealand. All he has in life is a half hectare of Pinot Noir, a guest cottage where his days are numbered, a special needs cat named Max, and a winemaker partner pressing him for a more committed relationship. These modest assets are balanced by the impending publication of Miles’s new novel, A Year of Pure Feeling. His fledgling publicist has arranged for a book tour that will take Miles along the east coast of New Zealand, from Oamaru to Auckland, to a series of increasingly interesting Kiwi book clubs. In a six-ton camper van! In the winter! Jack Manse, after a divorce and a financial disaster, has reinvented himself and gleefully volunteers to copilot, too delighted at the prospect of a road trip and a reunion with Miles to heed his friend’s objections. Alternately blackly comical and poignantly heartbreaking, what started as a book tour through New Zealand becomes a journey through Miles’s soul.

A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Rex Pickett's Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships. The basis for the 2004 comedy-drama road movie of the same name starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Sideways is the story of two friends-Miles and Jack-going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles--who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career and has lost his passion for living-the trip is a week long opportunity to evaluate his past, his future and himself.

A November Book Pick from The New York Times When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started—to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel. Emily’s job comes with its inherent pressures. West’s wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who’s about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library—an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who’s who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible. As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted “dark archives,” in which she opens a Pandora’s box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record. Twisting slowly like a tourniquet, The Archivist turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.

"Sideways 3 Chile" is the third, and final, novel in the trilogy that began with "Sideways" -- which became the award-winning movie of the same title by Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne -- and "Vertical," which won the 2011 Gold Medal for Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. "Sideways 3 Chile" finds our main protagonist Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti in the original film) running out of money, but still surviving on the fumes of a past, but fleeting, fame. When he is offered an opportunity by a reputable magazine to write an article about the diverse wine regions of the country of Chile he jumps at the chance. At the end of "Vertical," Miles had fallen in love with a Spanish girl, Laura, and he asks her to fly from Spain to accompany him. Miles, in full panic anxiety mode, which is endemic to his character, flies to Chile to meet Laura and discover this beautiful and vast country. Complications, heartbreak, and romance ensue. In the great and desolate Atacama Desert in the north of Chile Miles comes face to face with himself. Keywords: Sideways, Rex Pickett, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Wine, Chile, Miles, Jack, Sideways movie

A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette in New Zealand.

The follow-up novel to the blockbuster Sideways—the inspiration for the award-winning film of the same name, starring Paul Giamatti—Sideways Oregon tracks the continuing story of Miles Raymond and his buddy Jack. Seven years have passed since Miles and Jack took their infamous bachelor trip to the Santa Ynez Valley. Miles has written a novel that was made into a wildly successful movie, which changed his life. Jack, contrarily, is divorced, has a kid, and is on the skids. Phyllis, Miles’s mom, suffered a stroke that left her wheelchair-bound and wasting away in assisted living, and she desperately wants to live with her sister in Wisconsin. When Miles gets invited to be master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Festival in Oregon, he hatches a harebrained scheme. With Jack as his copilot, he leases a handicapped-equipped van, hires a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker, and—with his mother’s rascally Yorkie in tow—they take off for Wisconsin via Oregon’s fabled Willamette Valley. This is one road trip that is anything but predictable ...

“As a study of fiction, femininity and family it is bursting with intelligence and fire”—from the award-winning author of Death of a She Devil (The Telegraph). Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua—a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet—a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order—has announced to Beverley, her aged grandmother, that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright, he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. How the kehua became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them. “A haunting book . . . The novel is a spirited triumph: adroit, affecting and bung-full of genuine humour and ideas.” —The Guardian “Weldon crafts this traffic between spirit worlds with characteristic wit, and without sacrificing the intricacies of a family’s struggle to accept its past.” —Financial Times “Wonderfully wicked, highly readable.” —Independent

Reg Dodd grew up at Finniss Springs, on striking desert country bordering South Australia's Lake Eyre. For the Arabunna and for many other Aboriginal people, Finniss Springs has been a homeland and a refuge. It has also been a cattle station, an Aboriginal mission, a battlefield, a place of learning, and a living museum. With his long-time friend and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon, Dodd reflects on his upbringing in a cross-cultural environment that defied social conventions of the time. They also write candidly about the tensions surrounding power, authority, and Indigenous knowledge that have defined the recent decades of this resource-rich area. Talking Sideways is part history, part memoir, and part cultural road-map. Together, Dodd and McKinnon reveal the unique history of this extraordinary place and share their concerns and their hopes for its future.

Vertical Passion and Pinot on the Oregon Wine Trail is the continuance of the Sideways characters Miles and Jack as they travel to the International Pinot Noir Celebration in the Willamette Valley. Hilarious and serious, this road trip takes surprising and unexpected turns. LA Weekly termed it a "comic masterpiece".