Search results for ""Author Fletcher Beryl""
Spinifex Press Juno and Hannah
1920, deep in the New Zealand bush, a settlement of Christian fundamentalists live a life of austerity and isolation. It is a place where there is little space for compassion, particularly for the women who can never rid themselves of Eve’s original sin. The elders rule over the women, children and young men, meting out punishments for transgressions as ordinary as self-reflection. Sisters Juno and Hannah have grown up in the community, but when a stranger washes up on the river bank and Hannah goes to his aid, she finds herself accused of necromancy. The girls flee but are quickly forced to accept help. Hannah, unsure who is friend or foe, finds herself dependent upon and attracted to the man into whose lips she breathed life. Juno and Hannah is a remarkable novella. The vivid New Zealand landscape reflects the journey of the sisters with its bounty of beauty and resources but also with its scars, wrought during the early days of colonisation.
£14.95
Spinifex Press The Silicon Tongue
The Silicon Tongue is centred on the life of London-born Alice who was brought to New Zealand as a servant in the 1930s. Tricked by the authorities into believing she was an orphan, Alice tells her story into the tape recorder of a mysterious oral historian and discloses family secrets of rape and adoption. She discovers a kinship with a teenage nethead called Pixel and learns that old women can fly in cyberspace along with the young. Meanwhile, Alice’s daughter Joy finds out that when it comes to family stories there is always more than one version of the truth.
£11.95
Spinifex Press The Iron Mouth
The first problem is the return of the nightmare. Elena dreams of a white horse lying dead in a river; a mare with a huge pale wound in her side. She lies half out of the water, her wound washed clean and cold by the moving current. Elena attempts to call out the mare’s name but her throat is frozen with grief. Khryse is writing a film script based on The Iliad. As the script unfolds, some of the lives around her also unravel. Khryse notices the refracting Homeric world on the border between the modern city and its seafront. Narratives of death, betrayal and glory are entangled in lives disrupted by violence, love, sex and obsession.
£14.95
Spinifex Press The House at Karamu
What does a place mean? An old kauri villa with a one-roomed school attached is the place that has sustained a writer, Beryl Fletcher, through turbulent years and an obsessive love. Sent away at the age of six for a few months to the house at Karamu, she discovered books and spent many nights reading by candlelight, listening to the call of the moreporks. Karamu became a symbolic landscape of safety that helped her to survive.
£14.95
Spinifex Press The Word Burners
How do you decide to live? Or do others make that decision for you? In this lyrical novel, Beryl Fletcher explores the paradoxes of modern life. As a new academic, Julia finds her beliefs challenged by her students, reinforced by her friend’s mistreatment and dismissed by her family. Just as her mother sought freedom from her family’s rural poverty, Julia and her sister Isobel, search for their own solace finding it in different and disparate places.
£14.95