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10 February 2025

Your perfect match: find the NZ book of your dreams

With Valentine's Day coming up fast, it's time for a less conventional love story. We think falling in love with a book from Aotearoa NZ is the ultimate romance: we love our stories and our authors! If you're currently wedded to an international title, here's some ideas for a fresh local fling.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try The Vintner's Luck?

Burgundy, 1808. One night Sobran Jodeau, a young vintner, meets an angel in his vineyard: a physically gorgeous creature with huge wings that smell of snow, a sense of humour and an enquiring mind. Every year on the midsummer anniversary of the date, they meet again. Village life goes on, meanwhile, with its affairs and mysteries, marriages and murders, and the vintages keep on improving – through the horrors of the Napoleonic wars, and into the middle of the century, as science marches on, viticulture changes, and gliders fly like angels.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try The Bookshop Detectives?

When a mystery parcel arrives at Sherlock Tomes bookshop in small-town Havelock North, New Zealand, husband-and-wife owners Garth and Eloise (and their petrified pooch, Stevie) are drawn into the baffling case of a decades-old missing schoolgirl.

Intrigued by the puzzling, bookish clues the two ex-cops are soon tangled in a web of crime, drugs, and floral decapitations, while endeavouring to pull off the international celebrity book launch of the century.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try Corkscrew You?

If Shelby Armstrong wants to keep her late father’s beloved Flora Valley Wines in business, she’ll have to listen to Nathan Durant’s advice. But given the fact that Shelby is all heart and Nate is nothing but tough love, bringing the winery back to life quickly becomes a battle of wills. And yet, Shelby and Nate aren’t incompatible in every way – in fact, an unexpected (and unexpectedly hot) kiss shows Shelby that they’d make a very good team – in the bedroom! But as is always the case when it comes to love and money, things quickly get complicated…

If you fell in love with...

...why not try Native Son?

Look at him, the young man on the cover. The year is 1972, he is 28, his first book is about to be published, and he has every reason to kick up his heels.

But behind that joyful smile, and the image of a writer footing it in the Pākehā world, there is another narrative, one that Witi has not told before. The story of a native son, struggling to find a place, a voice and an identity, and to put a secret past to rest. This sequel to his award-winning memoir picks up where Māori Boy stopped, following Witi through his triumphs and failures at school and university, to experimenting sexually, searching for love and purpose and to becoming our first Māori novelist.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try Bookshop Dogs?

Dogs of all shapes and sizes visit Ruth Shaw's three wee bookshops in Manapōuri in the far south of Aotearoa New Zealand. Local dogs, holiday house dogs, travelling dogs: many have great stories, be they funny, sad, strange, bemusing, quirky or sweet. This is a window into the wonderful world of Ruth and her generous love of people, books and dogs. It's a must-read for dog fans, book fans and anyone who loved her first book, The Bookseller at the End of the World.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try Gideon the Ninth?

Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, first in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as arcane revenants. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try Auē?

Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father's. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try She's A Killer?

Thirty-something Alice has a near-genius IQ and lives at home with her mother with whom she communicates by Morse code. Alice’s imaginary friend, Simp, has shown up, with a running commentary on her failings. ‘I mean, can you even calculate the square root of 762 anymore?’ The last time Simp was here was when Alice was seven, on the night a fire burned down the family home. Now Simp seems to be plotting something.

When Alice meets a wealthugee named Pablo, she thinks she’s found a way out of her dull existence. But then she meets Pablo’s teenage daughter, Erika – an actual genius full of terrifying ambition. She’s a Killer is the story of a brilliant and stubborn slacker who is drawn into radical action. It’s about what happens when we refuse to face our most demanding problems, told by a woman who is a strange and calculating force of chaos.

If you fell in love with...

...why not try The Space Between?

A gripping historical novel set amid the New Zealand Wars in 1860. As English settlers wage war upon local iwi in colonial Taranaki, two women confront their pasts to survive the present.

Frances is an unmarried Londoner newly landed in New Zealand, 1860, at the dawn of the First Taranaki War. Once well-regarded, her family’s fall from grace sees them struggling to learn the strange etiquette of settler life.

When Frances comes face-to-face with Henry White, the man who jilted her a decade earlier, he’s standing outside Thorpe’s General Store with a sack of flour in his arms. Henry is married now — to the proud and hardy Matāria, who is shunned by her whānau due to this controversial marriage.

Go on, you know you want to! Pick up any of these swoonworthy Aotearoa books at bookhub.co.nz