Early nineteenth century New Zealand - the great chief Te Rauparaha has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from where Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies. Off the coast of Kapiti, English trader John Stewart seeks to trade with Te Rauparaha, setting off a train of events that forever change the course of New Zealand history. Narrated by two English sailors on board Stewart's ship, these events are also eerily resonant of a more distant memory, stretching back into mythology, of the charismatic leader Wulf and an ancient lament. History, it seems, may be repeating itself. � Wulf, Hamish Clayton's inventive, brilliant first novel, explores a subject little covered in New Zealand fiction, and marks the emergence of a startlingly assured, exciting new voice. � 'I was blown away by Wulf's imaginative derring-do. It is easily the most impressive debut I've read in a long time.' -Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip � 'A powerfully imagined novel...

The new novel from Hamish Clayton, award-winning author of Wulf, The Pale North is a disarming, exquisitely written work with a haunting love story at its heart. 1998, Wellington. A series of catastrophic earthquakes has left the city destroyed. Returning to the ruin from London, a New Zealand writer explores the devastation, compelled to find out for himself what has become of the city he left years ago. As he drifts through the desolate streets, home now to the shell-shocked and dispossessed, he finds among the survivors a woman and a child. And although they are haunted, hostile and broken, the strangers feel eerily familiar to him: as if they promise the answers to the mysteries he once swore to leave behind. A layered meditation on love, history, creativity and loss, The Pale North is an audacious and disarming novel, a forensic journey into one writer's short but singularly brilliant body of work. Invoking W. G. Sebald, Julian Barnes and Lloyd...