Bøker av Stevan Eldred-Grigg

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 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.

Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It's the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valarie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is a 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 a little boy dreaming and singing, wondering and wishing, in the bush, rain, rust and sooty streets of 1950s Blackball. A story told by the boy. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by his mother - someone who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles. Stevan is one of New Zealand's most prolific writers with 24 books published (including histories, novels, and true tales) and numerous articles, essays, and short stories. He is an award-winning author, a best-selling author, yet still a humble and engaging author.

This book looks at the lives of New Zealanders during the greatest armed struggle the world has ever seen: the Second World War. It is not a political, economic or military history; rather it explores what life was like during the war years for ordinary people living under the New Zealand flag. It questions the war as a story of good against bad. All readers know that the Axis powers behaved ruthlessly, but how many are aware of the brutality of the Allied powers in bombing and starving enemy towns and cities? New Zealand colluded in and even carried out such brutal aggressions. Were we, in going to war, really on the side of the angels? Contrary to the propaganda of the time -- and subsequent memory -- going to war did not unite New Zealanders: it divided them, often bitterly. People disagreed over whether or not we should fight, what we were fighting for and why, who was fighting, who was paying, and who was dying. In this provocative and moving book, Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg explore New Zealanders hopes and fears, beliefs and superstitions, shortages and affluence, rationing and greed, hysteria and humour, violence and kindness, malevolence and generosity, to argue that New Zealand need not have involved itself in the war at all.