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Along For the Ride: A Political Memoir. Tony Simpson
A noted writer and social historian, Tony Simpson has also spent many years as a unionist (former president of the PSA) and public servant, eventually becoming a senior advisor to Jim Anderton of the Alliance Party. In his memoir Simpson reflects on his many decades of experience behind the scenes in the New Zealand political world.

Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land. Kristyn Harman
Harman’s book tells the little-known story of the convicts who were transported from New Zealand to Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was then called. In the mid-1800s over a hundred individuals were sentenced to transportation, to labour in the Tasmanian penal colony. Harman brings some of these characters to life offering us insights into the British imperial and colonial project.

Dancing With the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885. Michael Belgrave
In Dancing With the King Belgrave tells the story of when the King Country really was the King’s Country, the twenty years following the end of the war in the Waikato in 1864 when Tāwhiao held effective sovereignty over the rohe.

The Long Dream of Waking: New Perspectives on Len Lye. Eds., Paul Brobbel, Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks.
A festschrift for one of Aotearoa’s most internationally recognised artists, the ground-breaking modernist Len Lye, The Long Dream of Waking’s essays cover all aspects of Lye’s diverse practice.

Māori Television: The First Ten Years. Jo Smith
From its origins in its brief to protect and promote te reo and tikanga Māori, Māori Television has gone on to become a cornerstone of Aotearoa’s public broadcasting, giving Māori Television an impact much greater than was initially envisioned. Jo Smith gives us an in-depth account of the first ten years of this path-breaking media organisation.

Private Oceans: The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas. Fiona McCormack
Through a comparative analysis of fisheries in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Hawaii, McCormack explores how the oceans have been transformed from a collective commons used to sustain small-scale fishing communities into another privatised resource for international capital to extract profits while passing off the costs of environmental damage to society as a whole. The Individual Transferable Quota system is held up to a rigorous critique, showing the poverty of marketised systems of environmental management.

Saints and Stirrers: Christianity, Conflict and Peacemaking in New Zealand, 1814-1945. Ed., Geoffrey Troughton.
This collection of eleven essays looks over the history of Christian pacifism in New Zealand. While some Christian sects were anti-war on principle, pacifists were a minority within the established churches. The story of Archibald Baxter is relatively well known but the extent of the broader pacifist tradition in NZ is typically overlooked.