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Montana New Zealand Book Awards - Fiction - 2008 finalists

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

The Blue

Mary McCallum (Penguin Group NZ)
Mary McCallum's debut novel The Blue is about a woman living in an isolated community at the ends of the earth trying to make the best of a life that has at its core a secret grief. It is a time when men nursed their own griefs from the Great War and the Depression, and didn't know that soon the world would make demands on them and their sons again. It is 1938. The place is Arapawa Island, Tory Channel, where for three months of the year, these men leave behind their farms and battle the elements to run down and kill migrating whales with small fast boats and explosive harpoons. This is not the time or place to dwell on the past, either for these men or for Lilian. However, the return of Lilian's troubled son sets in train events which force what happened 12 years before to come out into the light. The Blue powerfully evokes life in the isolated whaling community and there is a feel of high authenticity in the detail of whale chases, harpooning, flensing and processing.

Edwin & Matilda

Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Group NZ)
This beautifully written new novel by Laurence Fearnley is about finding love in the most unlikely of places. Set in the southern South Island, it describes the unusual friendship formed between 62-year-old photographer Edwin and 22-year-old Matilda, whom he meets when shooting photographs for her wedding. Brought together, Edwin and Matilda embark on a search for Edwin's mother, a woman he has long believed dead. The journey involves a series of agonising discoveries by Edwin, about his parents and what really happened years before. Their search takes them to a former TB sanatorium, where Edwin recalls childhood days and a mother who one day walked out of his life, to Franz Josef and a sister he never knew he had, and finally to a nursing home and the discovery of his elderly mother, where the novel ends. Along the journey, Edwin and Matilda develop an intense relationship, which grows in ways neither of them could possibly have predicted. The growing, tentative intimacy between them is touching and compelling.

Luminous

Alice Tawhai (Huia Publishers)
Following her debut collection "Festival of miracles" comes a new collection of short stories. Her tales combine characters and occurrences that are at once cripplingly daring yet tinged with a quiet beauty and optimism and she deftly covers subjects such as love, identity, devotion and abandonment.

Opportunity

Charlotte Grimshaw (Random House NZ)
"You could look back after a long time and ask, who wanted what from whom?" A man confronts death after an operation, a devout Christian encounters a man who hurt her long ago, a secretary uncovers her boss's secret shame. And in a house in Auckland an elderly woman is writing the last book of her life, one which, she says, contains all of her crimes. How are the characters connected and who is writing the stories? Each of these astute stories is an inspection of motive, rich in vivid insight into a diverse range of lives. Together, they form a unified whole. Opportunity is a book about storytelling, about generosity and opportunism; above all it is a celebration of the subtleties of human impulses, of what Katherine Mansfield called the LIFE of life.