![]() Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival. Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds – and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them – bleed into one another. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. ‘If it keeps me awake,’ says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.’ But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey $35.00 NZDĮverywhere, the birds: sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, starlings and bellbirds, fantails and pipits – but above them all and louder, the magpies. We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now. Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by MarniĮ, and this is where his story might have ended. Meanwhile stories about the gold grow with the telling: who has it, where is it and how much went down with the ship.įrom the author of the bestselling Jerningham, Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant is a vivid imagining of the story behind the enduring mystery of one of New Zealand’s early shipwrecks.Show more Stuck on a freezing and exposed island, the castaways have to work together to stay alive, but they’re a disparate group with their own secrets to keep and their only officer is disabled by grief after losing his wife in the wreck. Ourteen men make it ashore and one woman – Mrs Jewell. ![]() In the fog and the dark, the ship strikes the cliffs of the Auckland Islands, is sucked into a cave and wrecked. It’s 1866 and the three-masted sailing ship General Grant is on the southern route from Melbourne to London, with gold from the diggings secreted in returning miners’ hems and pockets. Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders $37.00 NZD ![]()
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