The New Zealanders: A Sequence of Stories

Description

Title: The New Zealanders: A Sequence of Stories

Author: Maurice Shadbolt

Publisher: Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, 1959.  Reprinted 1976

Format: Paperback

Condition: Good — discolouration of pages and slight fading along spine but structurally very good

Description:

Maurice Shadbolt went to London in 1957, spent two years looking back at the country he had come from, and put together a sequence of stories about what he saw. The New Zealanders was published in 1959, simultaneously in New Zealand by Whitcombe & Tombs and in Britain by Victor Gollancz, and went on to be published in the United States in 1961.

It was the book that made him. Muriel Spark praised it. Alan Sillitoe praised it. The British literary establishment received a young New Zealand writer as a serious voice — which, in 1959, was still unusual enough to mean something. The NZ critical response was, as it often was then, “predominantly and probably unfairly negative.” But the book’s standing was established, and Shadbolt became a full-time professional writer for the rest of his life.

The stories are about mid-century New Zealanders in the process of becoming themselves. A country still describing itself as Britons abroad, beginning to understand that New Zealand, not Britain, is home. The cultural clash between urban and rural, the landscape, the ordinary texture of lives being lived in a specific place and time — this is what Shadbolt was doing here, at 27, in a London bedsit, looking back.

Shadbolt went on to win the Wattie Award twice, the NZ Book Award for Fiction, the CBE, an honorary doctorate from Auckland University, and eventually the AW Reed Award for Contribution to NZ Literature. Strangers and Journeys was placed by Professor Lawrence Jones of Otago University among contenders for the “Great New Zealand Novel.” Season of the Jew was a bestseller. None of it would have happened without this book.

Why We Stock It:

The debut of NZ’s most widely read mid-century novelist, praised by Muriel Spark and Alan Sillitoe on publication. A piece of NZ literary history. Handled with care.