A stack of books

NZ Books Abroad has a fantastic competition underway to celebrate NZ Book Month with a prize over $1,000 of NZ Books (all 25 of this year's Montana finalists.) The webshop, which sells NZ titles to NZ and the world, has hidden five phoney titles among the genuine books it stocks.

You have to look for odd titles, silly blurbs, strange covers and unlikely authors and email your picks. It's a lot of fun. All correct entries go in a draw.

Without giving too much away, I enjoyed the 'fake' book set in parliament which included in its blurb: 'When Hide’s hatchet falls, bodies must be disposed of...' and had an 'endorsement' from a certain member of parliament which went like this:

After reading my advance copy I installed (at great personal expense) a mother of a shredder in my office — NZ Last MP.

NZ Books Abroad is owned by Louise Wrightson who is a bookseller of longstanding and a poet. I recommend it to people overseas who are (clears throat) clamouring for The Blue.

It's Montana Day Today

The winners of the Montana NZ Book Awards are announced tonight at a dinner at the Wellington Town Hall. I am a-twitch with nerves but trying to enjoy the moment. It is simply thrilling to be there in the final four with Laurence Fearnley, Alice Tawhai and Charlotte Grimshaw. So all power to us! And watch this spot.

The Blue in Fiji

Alexandra and Quentin sent me this photo of The Blue in Fiji beside the pool with wine glasses taken last year. It looks pretty perky if a little out of its depth (probably wondering if that's Montana wine about to be served.) The thing is the humpback whales that migrate through Cook Strait - and are the main targets of the whale hunts in the book - usually head to Tahiti or Rarotonga rather than Fiji, or that's my understanding.

I tried to get to Tahiti when I was researching The Blue but it wasn't possible. I really just wanted to see the humpback whales breaching, it is supposed to be one of the wonders of the world. I had to look at photos instead.

Talking of wine, David Cohen has waded into the feeding frenzy over the caught short Montana shortlist.

Thanks A and Q for the Fijian still-life.

An orchard you can take on your lap

With all the furore over the Montana Book Awards (mostly around the fact of their being only four finalists in the Fiction category not five as usual) it might pay to remind ourselves what we're all talking about.

My friend Quentin sent me this quote which he found clearing out his study. It's written by the great ninth-century intellectual Al-Jahiz in praise of the book:

Have you ever seen [elsewhere] a garden that will go into a man's sleeve, an orchard you can take on your lap, a speaker who can speak of the dead and yet be the interpreter of the living? Where else will you find a companion who sleeps only when you are asleep, and speaks only when you wish him to?

According to Wikipedia, Al-Jahiz wrote 360 books in his long life. Islamic scholar H.A.R Gibb said, 'The most genial writer of the age, if not of Arabic literature, and the founder of the Arab prose style, was the grandson of a Negro slave, Amr ben Bahr, known as Al-Jahiz, 'The Goggle-Eyed.' ' His writings brought together the knowledge and wisdom of the time, one book being about 'the skills of language and eloquence, the art of silence and the art of poetry.'

I wonder which Montana category he would have fitted into?

Links: Al-Jahiz on wikipedia, the blue swims into montana finals, the montana stoush on beattie's bookblog, martin edmond muses on his montana nomination

More recent links (added Saturday June 14): more on beattie's , hear the radio nz discussion, read it in nz herald

The Blue swims into the Montana Finals

I am still trying to digest the news. But here it is. The Blue is shortlisted in the FICTION category of the Montana Book Awards. Not the Best First Book of Fiction but the category people like Maurice Gee and Lloyd Jones compete in.

My friend Penny rang with the news after she'd read the Dompost this morning and I thought she'd made a mistake. I got her to read it over. But no, there are no finalists for the Best First Book award this year, apparently. The Blue has swum into deeper waters. Here's the list.

Fiction: The Blue by Mary McCallum (Penguin Group NZ), Edwin & Matilda by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Group NZ), Luminous by Alice Tawhai (Huia Publishers), Opportunity by Charlotte Grimshaw (Random House NZ).

Which is all rather daunting.

Bookman Beattie has the full list of finalists which includes Poetry, Biography and History, and he's already investigating why there are only four Fiction finalists as opposed to the usual five and why there is no First Book Award.

So, perplexing and daunting and wonderful.

Thanks to Maggie Rainey-Smith who has already posted a congratulatory comment on the previous post. And speaking of the previous post, Mum came through didn't she?

Link: The Dominion Post

Holding up The Blue

On the eve of the announcement of the Montana Award finalists (June 10), I am posting a photo of my Mum. That's The Blue she's holding and Kapiti Island is lying fetchingly behind them.

Mums and Dads are good when award anxiety sets in. They think - however good the opposition - that your first-time novel should be shortlisted for every major award, and will most certainly win.

They have already told everyone about the book from the moment of its launch: the woman at the garden shop, the butcher, the GP's nurse. They carried it around for weeks so they could brandish it when running into friends and acquaintances, and have gently insisted that every single one of them read it and report back. They've made sure the library has multiple copies, and have been known to rearrange bookshop displays when no-one's looking so your book is suddenly (yet again) Read of the Week.


So this post is in part a good luck charm for the upcoming Montanas. In part a thank you. Here they are, my Mum and Dad, Norma and Lindsay McCallum, The Blue's unsung promotional team.


And here's one of the artistic shots they took of The Blue and Kapiti - braving the stares of startled beach walkers and hungry gulls to get it. It resonates with the blueness of The Blue, the stuff of islands and sea and sky. Blue wherever the eye goes.

In fact, people whaled from Kapiti as they did on Arapawa Island, and during one of the whale hunts in The Blue the Tory Channel whalers ponder going as far north as Kapiti Island in pursuit of the whale.

I love to think of Mum and Dad on Waikanae Beach organising this scene. Mum worried the book will fall off, Dad hoping the camera will work, and both of their voices travelling clear across the water. Then one of the beach walkers makes a silly comment about Mum sending the photo 'home' to England, and my Seaham-born Mum who's lived here over 40 years rounds on the gentleman and gives him an earful.

She tells him that the photo is staying right here in New Zealand because she and Lindsay are both kiwis now. By adoption. Kapiti-folk doing what parents round these parts do: photographing their daughter's book on a log. For her blog.