James Norcliffe

The lobolly boy has the gift of flight. He is invisible to most people, apart from the sensitives; is much coveted by sinister collectors; and he has the power to exchange identities with others. But the children who choose to exchange, often to escape very miserable lives, soon realise that to become one of these magical, Peter Pan like creatures brings complications and dangers they never anticipated. Suggested level: primary intermediate.

The Loblolly Boy

James Norcliffe is one of New Zealand's most widely published and anthologised poets. In Dark Days at the Oxygen Cafe, he looks over the shoulders of many characters and creatures, both real and imagined, and takes us deep into uncanny valleys. Poems about Seneca and James Dean sit alongside poems about a Turken dictator and an owl man. We share in a portentous UFO sighting, a small celebration for Laika the space dog, and Peter the Great being offered an Air New Zealand lolly. These scenes from myth, history, pop culture and personal experience make for a wryly funny, deeply felt collection that contemplates the quirks of shared and personal histories. 'His poems invariably get us to attend more closely to the spirit of existence, to moments of being.' -David Eggleton 'A poetry that risks delight.' -Michael Harlow

Dark Days at the Oxygen Cafe

A disappearance. An infatuation. The Frog Prince is an intriguing, multi-layered novel giving us a story, within a story, within a story. Remember the kiss between the frog prince and the princess? What about the part where the princess angrily flings the frog against the wall? What was that about? At an international school in France, the young teacher Cara writes her own version of the classic tale by the Brothers Grimm. Their fairy tale is nothing like Cara’s relationship with David, but when Cara disappears, can the story help David unravel what has happened? As for the various princesses and frogs in this intriguing multi-layered novel, will any live happily ever after? This is a stunning debut adult novel by James Norcliffe, who is renowned for his award-winning children’s books and for his poems, which David Eggleton says ‘invariably get us to attend more closely to the spirit of existence, to moments of being’.

The Frog Prince

Rat Tickling

Tessa Duder

Collection of poetry and short stories written by teenagers conveying the attitudes of young New Zealanders. Suggested level: senior secondary.

The Polar Bear Ward

Glyn Strange

Re-draft's 18th Collection of Writing by New Zealand Teenagers

Service Stations and Other Liminal Spaces

Fifteen short stories set in the period just before Tiananmen Square. The central characters are foreigners who must come to grips with China's mysteries, though they are a very mixed group of people and each finds a different way of responding. Norcliffe has published two collections of poems, and was a co-winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society's International Competition in 1992.

The Chinese Interpreter

Alan Graham Bunn

Tennis With Raw Eggs

The Blackwater Creek Silver Band has been reduced to the size of carrots by conjuror, Henry Falco. To restore the band to their original size requires some powerful magic, and the old cornet which belonged to Tom's grandfather is a vital ingredient. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

Under the Rotunda

Scheming Mallory and her reluctant sidekick Arthur have a Halloween misadventure involving nasty tricks, time travel and a sneaky cat. Mallory wants candy, as much as she can grab, and she's prepared to play some tricks (and kick a pesky black cat) to get it. But when she and her reluctant sidekick Arthur tangle with the owner of a spooky old house, the trick is on them. In the beat of a bat's wing, they're a century back in time with a mission to find that slippery cat, or Mallory will change shape forever...

Trick Or Treat

Various

Christchurch School for Young Writers

The Ninth Book in the Re-Draft Series

Fishing for Birds

Alan Bunn

Cupid on a Friday Night

Letters to Dr Dee

The World's Steepest Street

Three sequences of verse come together in this poetry collection that ranges in tone from meditative to satirical. The title sequence imagines the 14th-century French poet Fran�ois Villon stranded in the isolated and semideserted coal-mining town of Millerton; another vividly evokes the mysteries of the Indian rope trick; and the final one turns its focus on Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missionary whose character is intriguingly contradictory.

Villon in Millerton

ALONG BLUESKIN ROAD is a rich and diverse collection of poems from one of New Zealand's leading poets. Whether tender, lyrical, quirky or comic, the poems are invariably richly imaginative and beautifully crafted. Many of the poems were written in Dunedin during James Norcliffe's tenure as Burns Fellow and are imbued with a sense of this most poetic and individual of New Zealand cities; other poems derive from places as diverse as Borneo and the antebellum American South. Alan Riach wrote of A Kind of Kingdom: 'An atmosphere of summer lightning plays around James Norcliffe's poems . . . they act as tilted mirrors, sharp-edged postcards . . .' And of Rat Tickling, Claire Hero has written: '[the poems are] always exploring the raw edges of the sensuous, the beauty that shares its bed with danger . . . Norcliffe has given us a book as beautiful as a polished knife . . .'. Poems in along Blueskin Road have been published worldwide in such journals as Sport and Landfall (New Zealand), Island and Southerly (Australia), Antigonish and Malahat Reviews (Canada), Gargoyle and Sycamore and Manhattan Reviews (United States).

Along Blueskin Road

Jenny Cooper

A collection of poems selected to encourage young people to write their own. Includes writing prompts, an interview with the author and a guide to the main poetic techniques used. Suggested level: primary, intermediate, secondary.

Packing a Bag for Mars

A summer holiday arranged by their uncle for Kate and David, their mother and two of their friends, in an old house on an isolated bay on Banks Peninsular turns into a surprising and scary adventure. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

Penguin Bay

74 talented young New Zealanders bring us the very best of the poems, stories, dramas, and flash fictions they've found upstairs.

James Norcliffe

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