Green Grey Rain

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NZ$35.00
NZ$35.00
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​Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It’s the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valerie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is the well-spoken son of a landed family. They already have three kids. Gilbert has just taken a job as paymaster at a coal mine. The family is about to start life in a green and black and red township on the West Coast.


A little boy is born, almost in a taxi, and named Stevan.

​

Green Grey Rain tells the story of the first years of that little boy. A story told by Stevan. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by Valerie – who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles. A story of working and playing, dreaming and singing, crying and laughing, hoping and wishing, bush, rain, rust, and the sooty streets of Blackball.

Pru goes troppo

NZ$30.00

Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had sex for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia. Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.

‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy one day in Samoa.

‘I rather think we are, darling.’

‘Oh dear.’


​Pru goes troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of two people who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent. Among the themes explored in the story are class, gender, colonialism and neo-colonialism, ageing and belonging. And pratfalls.
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Green Grey Rain

NZ$35.00

​Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It’s the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valerie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is the well-spoken son of a landed family. They already have three kids. Gilbert has just taken a job as paymaster at a coal mine. The family is about to start life in a green and black and red township on the West Coast.


A little boy is born, almost in a taxi, and named Stevan.

​

Green Grey Rain tells the story of the first years of that little boy. A story told by Stevan. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by Valerie – who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles. A story of working and playing, dreaming and singing, crying and laughing, hoping and wishing, bush, rain, rust, and the sooty streets of Blackball.
Shop
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