Montana New Zealand Book Awards - Fiction - 2007 winner and finalists

The Montana New Zealand Book Awards are organised and administrated by Booksellers New Zealand, the trade association for booksellers and publishers.

 

Mister Pip Lloyd Jones, Penguin Books Winner (and winner of Readers' Choice)

Mister Pip is a love story, a story about the meaning of names and the power of words. It is about growing up, survival and the search for clues to make sense of life. Thirteen year old Matilda lives with her mother on the Pacific island of Bougainville, which suddenly becomes a violent place: Rebels want the copper mine, which is poisoning their island, to close. They are trying to drive the redskin army, enemies from neighbouring Papua New Guinea, into the sea. The abandoned schoolhouse is overgrown with jungle. In this troubled world, Mr Watts decides he will open the school once more, and read 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens aloud to his students, a chapter a day. Stories flourish on the island. While the lives of Pip and Magwitch and other characters from 'Great Expectations' are transformed in their new tropical setting, the locals come to the schoolhouse to tell their own tales, about the meaning of the colour blue, about broken dreams, black birds, devil women and a dozen other subjects. In Matilda's eyes, Pip is as real as any living person. He has become her friend. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. That's where the redskin soldiers see it, and decide they must track this stranger down. Who is this Mr Pip? The search to find him will have devastating consequences for Matilda, Mr Watts and the entire village. Matilda may never stop looking for him.

The Cowboy Dog Nigel Cox, Victoria University Press Runner up

Chester Farlowe was twelve when the coward Stronson shot his daddy down. Chester left the vast cattle ranches of New Zealand's central Volcanic Plateau for the badlands of urban Auckland. There he was given shelter by Henry Stroud, proprietor of the 1 Fry burger bar, and re-christened Mr Dog. There, too, he met the girl, Spoons. Now, six years later, he is back in those lands where the pylons march across the sky, and looking for revenge. Stronson is waiting, and there must be a showdown. But first there are others to contend with - Boss Lennox, Cook, the Sultation Kid, the seductive and inscrutable Miss Peet.

The Fainter Damien Wilkins, Victoria University Press Runner up

An emotionally charged comedy of manners - supremely elegant and funny but also with the power to shake the reader's feelings. Luke is a young diplomat on his first overseas posting. He's in New York, preparing for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. His photo has appeared in the New York Times. He has a knack for success. Then he witnesses a crime, the fallout from which threatens everything. His fainting spells return and he finds himself back in New Zealand, living on his sister's farm, caught up in another difficulty altogether, and involved in the life of a community whose personalities and rules of conduct he finds as bewitching and dizzying as anything experienced at the frontline of international diplomacy. By the end of his time there - which takes the reader only halfway through this novel - Luke has been asked the most testing questions about himself. In the second part of the book, these questions return with a new and surprising urgency.

My Name Was Judas C. K. Stead, Vintage

We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas? Judas's name became synonymous with betrayer, but is that how he saw it himself? In this witty, original and teasingly controversial account, some forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally tells the story as he remembers it. Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; their families; the people who would go on to be disciples and followers; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Temple. His is a story of friendship and rivalry, of a time of uncertainty and enquiry, a testing of belief, endurance and loyalty.

Ocean Roads James George, Huia Publishers

A story of love and loss. Rai, a 16 year old boy with a love of motorcycles, struggles with a legacy of silence and hidden truths within his family. He learns that the man he believed to be his father is actually his uncle. Rai sets out to find his dad and the only information he has to go on is the envelope in which the last leaf was sent to him. In the last chapter the threads from two stories come together, one in a shocking climax, the other giving some promise of steps finally retraced. This novel follows the lives of two half brothers who battle their way from the WWII Trinity Project at Los Alamos to Nagasaki; from Vietnam to an asylum outside Auckland.

Davey Darling Paul Shannon, Penguin Books (Best First Book - Fiction Finalist)

This coming-of-age novel contains echoes of Ian Cross's The God Boy. Both novels look at the world and family relationships through the eyes of a young boy on the brink of adolescence. Davey Ardsley is twelve years old, growing up in a working-class suburb of Christchurch in the early 1970s (Norman Kirk has just died) with a big, violent, hard-case father and a long-suffering mother. The fridge is always full of beer; his mother is always lighting another fag to have with her cup of tea. Davey is a bit of a hard-case himself, giving his father and Terry Appleby, the local thug, plenty of lip. One day Davey witnesses something he shouldn't and the repercussions that follow pitch the Ardsleys down a dark and tragic road. The outcome is that Davey has to choose between loyalty to his father or telling the truth. Confused by the misguided moralities of the adult world around him, Davey is forced to start making his own decisions. By turns funny and desperate, Davey Darling is also the story of the breakdown of a man's relationship with his family, particularly with his son.

Overdue New Releases Matt Johnson, Urban by Longacre Press (Best First Book - Fiction Finalist)

With disarmingly self-deprecating humour, Mark Penny recounts the days-of-his-life as a video store clerk in gritty, grubby inner urban Wellington. Mark darkly wisecracks his way through an ordinary week of customer service that takes in Yummie Mummies, art house boffins and blue movie addicts. This ordinary week is also Mark's friend, Ben's, last as his co-worker. Ben is off to a scintillating career path as a lawyer, while Mark is fast heading in the opposite direction: almost 30, living at home with his parents and messing up his current relationship. How did it all go wrong? Mark searches in vain for the redemptive ending, the myths or morals to live a life by. After all, he looks back on Star Wars and waiting for the high school bus as emotional pinnacles. This novel smartly echoes some of its own subject matter, with edge-of-the-seat, good-guy, bad-guy action, and with themes of lost innocence and the corruption of the adult world. A melancholic undertow rears as the novel gradually reveals just how harshly the adolescent world was taken from these two young men.

The Sound of Butterflies Rachael King, Black Swan ( Best First Book - Fiction Finalist)

In 1904, the young lepidopterist Thomas Edgar arrives home from a collecting expedition in the Amazon. His young wife Sophie is unprepared for his emaciated state and, even worse, his inability - or unwillingness - to speak. Sophie's genteel and demure life in Edwardian England contrasts starkly with the decadence of Brazil's rubber boom, as we are taken back to Thomas's arrival in the Amazon and his search for a mythical butterfly. Up the river, via the opulent city of Manaus - where the inhabitants feed their horses champagne and aspire to all things European - Thomas's extraordinary, and increasingly obsessed, journey carries him through the exotic and the erotic to some terrible truths. Back home, unable to break through Thomas's silence, Sophie is forced to take increasingly drastic measures to discover what has happened. But as she scavenges what she can from Thomas's diaries and boxes of exquisite butterflies, she learns as much about herself as about her husband.