Michelle Rahurahu
Te Herenga Waka University Press

Longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

ERIN can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom.

STAR is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide.

It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began.

Matt Vance
Potton & Burton

Innerland combines essay and memoir, where Matt Vance takes us on a sharp-eyed and poignant journey through our everyday places, places that have been shaped in our minds by the unseen influences of words, images, and memories. It is a journey that takes us from park benches, malls, and mudflats to the modest suburbs of New Zealand. Eloquent and witty, Innerland reveals a fresh way of seeing and understanding the ordinary landscapes around us.

Rob Foote

Samples from the Lab chronicles the awkward and amusing experiments of Professor Fictitious Karacter. The story follows his misguided attempts to meddle with nature and the eventual, disastrous results.

The story is written as a whimsical scientific journal with daily entries describing Fictitious’s experiments, along with illustrated drawings and sketches of the unexpected results. The scientific logic is nonexistent and the outcomes are unlikely to be reproduced except as puns and visual humour.

The story however still has some relevance as a strange virus starts to spread. The diary entries become a little more panicked as things begin to spiral out of control. Fictitious eventually meets an unlikely end but the curious creatures go on to escape the lab and inspire a book.

Samples from the Lab appeals to readers of all ages, particularly 11 and up.

Simon Sweetman
The Cuba Press

I wrote most of what you read here in a blur, in a few months, on my phone. I wrote these poems while walking around town, and on a trip to Auckland. I wrote these poems in Hawke’s Bay too. I wrote these poems and heard the music that had inspired many of them in my head, did not need to play the songs, sometimes would not have wanted to. I wrote these poems because I could think of nothing else. Many of them had been living inside me for 20 and 30 years. Some of them arrived as if to punch me in the gut. Others wanted to hold my hand and help me on the walk. And some are still trying to work out if they’re friend or foe. All I know is that I had to write these poems. It was time.

Alex Scott
Earths End

A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed critique of our media-obsessed society.

"Episodes is a fantastic first graphic novel which offers a devastating critique of our ever-changing-but-always-obsessive relationship with mainstream media and social media" - NZ Review of Books

Please note that despite the fun illustration style, this book contains mature material and isn't written for kids.