As if it will make up for her loss, they bring Hannah a duckling to care for. They were well meaning, and it could have done the trick. However, Hannah’s focus on the duck progressively alienates those around her. As the duck takes over her world, past secrets are exposed. Will Hannah’s life unravel completely? This funny, moving and insightful novel contemplates the chemistry between one person and another: a man and another man’s wife; a woman and a duck; a woman and her dead mother; a drug addict and his drug. Beautifully written, it is a penetrating and compassionate view of marriage, dependency, obsession, addiction, and love.

A quirky, astute and heart-warming novel about human relationships - and a duck. As if it will make up for her loss, they bring Hannah a duckling to care for. They were well meaning, and it could have done the trick. However, Hannah's focus on the duck progressively alienates those around her. As the duck takes over her world, past secrets are exposed. Will Hannah's life unravel completely? This funny, moving and insightful novel contemplates the chemistry between one person and another: a man and another man's wife; a woman and a duck; a woman and her dead mother; a drug addict and his drug. Beautifully written, it is a penetrating and compassionate view of marriage, dependency, obsession, addiction, and love.

Explains the equipment, skills, and techniques needed for duck hunting. Vibrant photographs and clear text help readers understand and imagine this fascinating way to explore the outdoors.

Love and passion - and their absence - are explored in this insightful, tragi-comic short story about an illicit affair. The narrator's married friend and his married lover, the new wife of her ex-husband: none of them has much to do with her, until they all want to use her spare room. What emotions will this coming together unleash?

Search for the elusive moose in the snowy north, and meet lots of other northland animals on the journey. Hardcover and Paperback editions include endnotes about all the creatures, a guessing game of animal footprints, and a page of informative facts about the moose.

To celebrate 50 years of publishing in Aotearoa New Zealand, this anthology brings together 50 enthralling stories from some of the country’s finest writers. From established authors to new, emerging names, these stories track the changing styles, voices and preoccupations explored through the short story over the past five decades. Read – and celebrate!

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country- music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Fifty-two years after the pink-headed duck was last seen in the wild, Rory Nugent set off for India in search of this exceptionally rare bird. In Calcutta he prowled the fowl market, where a few of the ducks used to appear during the Raj. Traveling on to Delhi, he was befriended by a Cambridge-educated smuggler, and he learned of remote regions to the north where the duck might be found. In Sikkim, following the trail of a Yeti, he became lost in the Valley of Bliss and nearly imprisoned inside a forest of rhododendrons, each the size of a ranch house. Making his way to Assam, he bought a 13-foot skiff and paddled the Brahmaputra River from Burma to Bangladesh, with stops on an island, considered to be Kali’s left breast, and at a Tantrist temple, where he stumbled on a grisly ritual in a graveyard. In a secluded marsh along the river he may have spotted the world’s rarest duck.

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year A revelatory tale of science, adventure, and modern myth. When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, Hohn learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes. In the grand tradition of Tony Horwitz and David Quammen, Moby-Duck is a compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity.

In his more than eighty years, Francis Wyndham has published very little—one novella and two collections of stories—but his is one of the most individual and compelling bodies of work by a contemporary English writer. As Alan Hollinghurst has said, Wyndham’s fiction stands in the tradition of social comedy that goes back through Henry James to Jane Austen, with this difference: Wyndham writes about the lives of privileged and even titled people, but he is drawn to outcasts and odd ducks, adolescents, lonely women, addicts, eccentrics, and idlers. The earliest stories here, gathered under the title Out of the War, are brilliant vignettes of deprivation and desire written during World War II. The later Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, by contrast, offers scrupulously observed tragicomic pictures of the vagaries of upper-class English family life. Finally, in the Whitbread Prize–winning short novel The Other Garden, a shy teenage boy living in the country strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kay, the thirty-something daughter of neighbors, sister to a famous actor, and black sheep of her family. Kay, with her whims and crazes and boyfriends, is unable to hold her own against her family’s disapproval, and the narrator watches with helpless fascination as her small but very real tragedy is played out against the background of the Second World War.