A Place to Stand

Description

Where is home? Can this be my place? These are the questions compelling the story set in small- town New Zealand. In 1956 Sandra McLeod and her British immigrant family come to Kawerau seeking a new life. But it was not an easy journey...When Sandra returs twenty years later she must confront ghosts of her past.

Twenty five years as a psychologist has given Helen McNeil's writing both insight and compassion. She writes about ordinary people dealing with the deep question she struggles with herself. Where is home? What does family mean? Are my beliefs worth the pain? Helen grew up in Kawerau where her own immigrant family found it a different life than the one they had anticipated. Helen currently lives in Earthsong Eco-neighbourhood (Auckland, New Zealand) alongside chickens and organic gardens.

'Helen McNeil's story, set in Kawerau during the 1950s when the town is being constructed around the mill, is uniquely New Zealand. The main character, Sandra McLeod, arrives as a child from England with her 'GBP10 Pom' family, but their new life isn't what they'd hoped it might be. Via flashbacks recalled by Sandra when she returns to Kawerau to visit her ailing mother in 1975, Helen McNeil skilfully describes the gradual disintegration of the McLeod family in realistic, evocative and sometimes gruelling detail. There is a sense, too, with the presence of the Maori and Catholic elements of the story, that Kawerau, perched as it is on a brittle volcanic crust, is a mystical place where both good and bad fortune can be magnified. The revelation of Sandra's secrets is perfectly timed to keep the reader turning pages, and the conclusion is as satisfying as you could hope for. A compelling and really quite haunting read from a new and distinctive voice in New Zealand fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed it.' Best-selling author Deborah Challinor