MCW Books

Winner of the New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book 2020. Does DNA write our destinies? Or do the hands that nurture triumph over nature? What is it that determines who we really are? Caroline Barron’s father never found his birth mother. After he dies suddenly on her…

Longisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize 2021. Fake Baby is a tender and funny exploration of the power of words, our perception of resilience and what it means to be real. Nine Days. One City. Three Oddballs. Stephen’s dead father is threatening to destroy the world.…

Whispering City is set between 1912 and 1917, in northern Greece, Dublin, London, Lemnos and Gallipoli. Three divisive and destructive wars sweep through the territory in rapid succession, but for three young women these uncertain times present an opportunity to escape their fettered pasts and seize the lives they want. When…

Winner of the international First Pages Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 NZSA Heritage Literary Award. Two young women, a generation apart, travel to opposite sides of the world on fraught journeys of self-discovery. 1958: Gabrijela yearns to escape the confines of bleak post-war Yugoslavia and her tiny fishing community,…

A satirical novel set in early 2000s Shanghai and New Zealand. After a failed marriage in Auckland, aspiring artist Mark Webster heads to Shanghai seeking adventure, romance, riches and a chance to indulge his painterly ambitions. His artistry is focused on a pagoda and a local beauty which results in…

The story of the lost wonders of New Zealand's natural history: the extinct species that are now gone forever. Lost Wonders also features some key species that are on the brink - critically endangered - and the efforts that are being made to save them for future generations. Story by…

We are tiny beneath the light charts the end of a marriage and the tumble of tiny moments that make up a life under stress, including the unexpected discoveries that can still bring joy – watching a child fly a blue kite or weaving words to make sense of sorrow. Heidi’s…

Is all love doomed under a heartless regime? Antonina is a student at the prestigious Academy of Art in St Petersburg. At times, though, she feels she might be a better fit at the Centre of Nonconformist Art across town. She knows she stands out as different, being neither Russian,…

Ten years after his father’s disappearance, Gordo Jenkins is on the brink of turning his life around. He’s about to finish college and pursue his filmmaking dream, and he’s fallen in love with Eleanor after a chance encounter in a New York City clinic. But then he’s confronted with news…

Longisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize 2020. The present reckons with the past in Attraction, Ruby Porter’s atmospheric debut novel. Three women are on a road trip, navigating the motorways of the North Island, their relationships with one another and New Zealand’s colonial history. Our…