Jerningham

Edward Jerningham Wakefield was the wild-child of the Wakefield family that set up the New Zealand Company to bring the first settlers to this country. His story is told through the eyes of bookkeeper Arthur Lugg, who is tasked by Colonel William Wakefield to keep tabs on his brilliant but unstable nephew.

As trouble brews between settlers, government, missionaries and Māori over land and souls and rights, Jerningham is at the heart of it, blurring the line between friendship and exploitation and spinning the hapless Lugg in his wake.

Alive with historical detail, Jerningham tells a vivid and important story of Wellington’s colonial beginnings and of a charismatic young man’s rise and inevitable fall.

Published by The Cuba Press, June 2020

Displaced

Winner of the 2020 Storylines Tessa Duder Award, Displaced is the story of  Eloise and her family, who must leave Cornwall on a treacherous sea journey to start a new life in 1870s colonial New Zealand. On the voyage Eloise meets Lars, a Norwegian labourer travelling below decks, and their lives begin to intertwine.

When her brother disappears, her father leaves and the family are left to fend for themselves in their new home, Eloise must find the strength to stand up for what she believes in and the people she loves.

Published by Walker Books April 2021

Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant

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. In the fog and the dark, the ship strikes the cliffs of the Auckland Islands, is sucked into a cave and wrecked.

Only fourteen men make it ashore and one woman – Mrs Jewell. 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. A woman is a burden they don’t need.

Meanwhile stories about the gold grow with the telling: who has it, where is it and how much went down with the ship.

Published by The Cuba Press 2022
Mrs Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2023, and shortlisted for NZ Booklovers Awards 2023.

Ōkiwi Brown

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders terrify Edinburgh in the 1830s befroe Burke is hanged, and Hare disappears. A decade later a whaler washes ashore in Port Nicholson. He walks around to the east side of the harbour, to Ōkiwi Bay, and there sets up a bush pub, of sorts, with a reputation for evil hospitality, and takes the name William Ōkiwi Brown.

Gentlemen musterers, travelling preachers, ex-soldiers come under his roof. There is a bosun on leave, looking for a drink and a fight. Young Mary Leckie is there, too, trying to keep her father sober, and a woman of unknown origin who lives there with Ōkiwi, taking his beatings as a wife.

When a body washes up on Ōkiwi’s beach, the witnesses are brought forward.

This novel is a work of fiction inspired by true events in the early days of colonial New Zealand.