About The Mires…

“The Mires is about the monsters we’ve created and the power we have to stop them. A truly magnificent novel.”
— Shankari Chandran, author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens
“The Mires is an enchanting novel: poignant, earnest and lyrical, this story will settle in your bones.”
— Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of The Hate Race

Water will come and you think it will be soft. You think it will be smooth and find its way around your things: your houses and cars and furniture; your gardens and windows and hope. But water can be the foot of an elephant, the horns of a moose, a herd of buffalo running from a lion, water can be the kauri falling in the forest, a two-tonne truck, a whole stadium filled with 50,000 people, screaming … Water is life, and water can be death.

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on stuff that isn’t hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.
 
When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.
 
The Mires is a tender and fierce novel that asks what we do when faced with things we don’t understand. Is our impulse to destroy or connect?

Available from Ultimo Press 3 July 2024. Pre-order Now!

“The Mires is a work of art. The impacts of colonisation, movement, and climate change cut to the bone in glittering prose and through characters kept close as neighbours. In The Mires, the environment speaks, culture transcends boundaries and the myriad ideas of home are bitterly defended. Only Tina Makereti could hold a reader in such tense tenderness.”
— Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country
“‘As both a writer and a refugee, this book resonates with my experiences, skilfully addressing the link between refugee lives, colonialism and climate change.’”
— Behrouz Boochani, author of No Friend but the Mountains
“An immersive, unnerving novel about the hatred that can rise up out of the locked, curtained rooms in our neighbourhoods, and the comfort that can be found in another’s home. A story about people and the land they share. The memories stored in the water and peat. I read this book with equal measures of worry and hope.”
— Becky Manawatu, author of Āue
 

About The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke…

"A riveting vision of the world seen from the inside out. The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke is a gutsy, searing and totally absorbing read. I loved it all the way." ~ Dame Fiona Kidman

"The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke is many things: part unsparing colonial reckoning; part fraught coming-of-age memoir; part PT Barnum-inflected tale of spectacle, showmanship and the picaresque." ~ Maggie Trapp, NZ Listener

While exhibited as a curiosity, a Māori boy turns his gaze on Victorian London:

The hour is late. The candle is low. Tomorrow I will see whether it is my friends or a ship homewards I meet. But I must finish my story for you first. My future, my descendant, my mokopuna. Listen.​

So begins the tale of James Poneke: orphaned son of a chief; ardent student of English; wide-eyed survivor. All the world’s a stage, especially when you’re a living exhibit. But anything can happen to a young New Zealander on the savage streets of Victorian London. When James meets the man with laughing dark eyes and the woman who dresses as a man, he begins to discover who people really are beneath their many guises.​Although London is everything James most desires, this new world is more dark and dazzling than he could have imagined.

"In a world that has privileged hierarchies and conflict, Tina’s novel is a welcome handbook on how to listen. It affected me deeply, at the level of both heart and mind. I am awarding it my 2018 Fiction Bouquet." Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf​

"A historical love letter to London, a coming-of-age story, a love story… do yourself a favour, read it." Stella Duffy

"Made streets I’ve walked a thousand times seem new and strange." Damian Barr

SHORTLISTED: New Zealand Heritage Book Awards. LONGLISTED: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. LONGLISTED: International Dublin Literary Award

 

About Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings…

"This remarkable first novel spans generations of Moriori, Maori and Pakeha descendants as they grapple with a legacy of pacifism, violent dominatination and cross-cultural dilemmas . . . Tina Makereti has produced a New Zealand classic that is both compelling as a novel and historically fascinating as it explores the Chatham Islands/Rekohu story."

~ Reading Room, Australian Womens Weekly

From the Chatham Islands/Rēkohu to London, the 21st century to 1835, this novel confronts the complexity of being Moriori, Māori and Pākehā.

In the 1880s, Mere yearns for independence. Her best friend Iraia wants the same, but as the descendent of a slave, such things are barely conceivable to him. One summer as they approach adulthood, they notice that their friendship has changed, and that, if they are ever to experience freedom, they will need to travel beyond the isolation and safety of their Queen Charlotte Sound home.

One hundred years later, twins Lula and Bigsy's birth is literally one in a million, as their mother Tui likes to tell people. But when Tui dies they learn there is much she kept secret, especially about their heritage. They too will need to travel beyond the world they have known, to an island they barely knew existed, at the eastern edge of New Zealand's Pacific realm.

Neither Mere and Iraia, nor Lula and Bigs are aware that someone else is part of their journeys. He does not watch over them so much as watch through them, feeling their loss and ​confusion as if it were his own.

“It is a rare thing for a novel so steeped in history to be simultaneously relevant to modern-day readers. . . . At the book's core is the yearning to understand and identify with contrasting, conflicting heritage. . . . Her story is a balanced blend of New Zealand history and character-driven fiction, one which highlights questions pondered by New Zealanders today.” ~ Rose Mannin, Otago Daily Times

“More than anything, the novel shows how fiction can represent the molecular dance of being human—the strengths, the weakness, the biases—in a way that refreshes your view of things . . . Tina's extraordinary book embraces all manner of loves and strengths but as it faces the challenging and complex effects and behaviours of racism (amongst other issues), it shows too the power of story to delve deep. To take risks. To refract and reflect . . . For me, the pleasure of the reading experience is multi-layered. Every now and then you find a book that satisfies on so many levels. It begins with the sentence—the way each is crafted with such finesse it is like the invisible stitching of fiction (at times though sentences are ambidextrous and are there to promote a visible and audible delight in language as well as to steer the narrative). Then there is the structure the holds the work together beautifully (in this case the entwined rope) along with the characters that gain such flesh and blood you become part of their world and it is a wrench to leave them. Finally there is the way a fictional work can strike you so profoundly, it enters and shakes both heart and intellect. Tina’s book has done all of this." - Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf