Language and Literature

Simon likes girls, weekends and enjoys mucking about and playing practical jokes, but what's different is that Simon has muscular dystrophy - he's in a wheelchair and doesn't have long to live. See Ya Simon is told by Simon's best friend,

Sione, Lima, Tavita and Filipo are high school friends, uso or brothers. They are part of a special letter-writing project that helps to start a brave new conversation, an open and honest talanoa with themselves starting with the words, Dear Uso ... Here they share the cultural c...hallenges they face, and without realising it, their need to belong, to be accepted and the impact this has on their wellbeing overall. Tama Samoa is not just a story of friendship, brotherhood and healing. Tama Samoa helps us all to reflect, reconnect and reunite in better supporting each other as who we are. It is also a story of self-discovery and hope for a new tama Samoa code to be created based on real talanoa and understanding. Also includes: - Study Questions For Students - The Tama Samoa Project: A space created for fourteen Samoan male students and educators to share their own boys-to-men stories, lessons and journeys to help today's tama Samoa, our tama Pasifika, to be better understood and supported in succeeding as themselves.
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This is the breakout non-fiction book from award-winning New Zealand writer Mohamed Hassan. From Cairo to Takapuna, Athens to Istanbul, How To Be A Bad Muslim maps the personal and public experience of being Muslim through essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration... and language. Traversing storytelling, memoir, journalism and humour, Hassan speaks authentically and piercingly on mental health, grief and loss, while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting childhood bullies, listening to life-saving '90s grunge and auditioning for vaguely-ethnic roles in a certain pirate movie franchise. At once funny and chilling, elegiac and eye-opening, this is a must-read book from a powerfully talented writer. "Mohamed Hassan takes the things we universally love - food, music, family, dreams of travel, a heart's desire - and affirms their gorgeous ordinariness. Then he reveals how othering shatters what we share; how it splinters "us" to create confusion, ignorance, hurt and even hate. Sometimes his writing is gently observational, sometimes sad, sometimes justly angry, but always important, timely and true." - John Campbell "The book is amazing. Mohamed Hassan is so talented. In How To Be A Bad Muslim, he pulls off that rare trick of taking a poet's grace and applying it to his essays, making them as beautiful to read as they are illuminating." - Dominic Hoey "Mohamed's is a fresh voice but most of all, an important voice. We already have his poetry, which has been rightly recognised, but now New Zealand literature is all the richer for his elegant and powerful non-fiction." - Rachael King "Mohamed Hassan writes from a space that nobody else stands in; a space borne of deep understanding and lived experience. He is Muslim, a child of Egypt and the Middle East and a child of New Zealand; a global traveler and reporter with his finger very firmly on the socio-politics of the globe and our place in it. He has a depth of vision, a level of craft and a talen
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New fiction title from Little, Brown, coming in 2022

In the middle of a moonless night in 1913, the Terra Nova steams silently into Oamaru harbour in New Zealand. The men aboard have a desperate mission - they must reach the relatives of Scott's South Pole expedition before the morning papers break the news that the whole party hav...e perished.
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