Stevan Eldred-Grigg Libri

Provides a look into our social history before, during and just after WW1.

After 25 years of a sexless marriage, Pru questions her life choices and embarks on an unexpected journey to Samoa following the death of her uncle. Accompanying her husband Guy to explore the inherited property, Pru experiences a transformative awakening, discovering new thoughts, feelings, and desires in the vibrant tropical setting. This adventure challenges her long-held beliefs and ignites a spark of change she never anticipated, leading her to reevaluate her life and relationships.

White Ghosts, Yellow Peril is the first book ever to explore all sides of the relationship between China and New Zealand and their peoples during the seven or so generations after they initially came into contact. The Qing Empire and its successor states from 1790 to 1950 were vast, complex and torn by conflict. New Zealand, meanwhile, grew into a small, prosperous, orderly province of Europe. Not until now has anyone told the story of the links and tensions between the two countries during those years so broadly and so thoroughly. The reader keen to know about this relationship will find in this book a highly readable portrait of the lives, thoughts and feelings of Chinese who came to New Zealand and New Zealanders who went to China, along with a scholarly but stimulating discussion of race relations, government, diplomacy, war, literature and the arts.

This book looks at the lives of New Zealanders during the greatest armed struggle the world has ever seen: the Second World War. It is not a political, economic or military history; rather it explores what life was like during the war years for ordinary people living under the New Zealand flag. It questions the war as a story of good against bad. All readers know that the Axis powers behaved ruthlessly, but how many are aware of the brutality of the Allied powers in bombing and starving enemy towns and cities? New Zealand colluded in and even carried out such brutal aggressions. Were we, in going to war, really on the side of the angels? Contrary to the propaganda of the time -- and subsequent memory -- going to war did not unite New Zealanders: it divided them, often bitterly. People disagreed over whether or not we should fight, what we were fighting for and why, who was fighting, who was paying, and who was dying. In this provocative and moving book, Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg explore New Zealanders hopes and fears, beliefs and superstitions, shortages and affluence, rationing and greed, hysteria and humour, violence and kindness, malevolence and generosity, to argue that New Zealand need not have involved itself in the war at all.