After Z-Hour

Description

The first new edition since 1987 of the prize-winning debut novel by the acclaimed author of The Vintner's Luck, Wake, and other New Zealand classics. First published on Armistice Day 1987, After Z-Hour was acclaimed by reviewers including Margaret Mahy and Keri Hulme, and won the PEN Award for Best First Book of Prose. Stranded by a South Island storm, six people usurp the stillness of an old house. As they tell the fragments of their story, a seventh voice responds: a young New Zealand serviceman who died in 1920 soon after his return from France. As the storm deepens, the hauntings of the mind and the hauntings of the house become one.

Elizabeth Knox is one of New Zealand's leading writers. She is the author of eight previous novels, including The Vintner's Luck (1999 Deutz Medal for Fiction, 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize) and its sequel The Angel's Cut, a trilogy of autobiographical essays, The High Jump, and a collection of personal essays, The Love School. The second part of her Dreamhunter Duet, Dreamquake, won an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Young Adult Literature in 2008, and her third novel for young adults, Mortal Fire, was published in June 2013. Elizabeth Knox was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2000 and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2002. She was recently awarded the prestigious 2014 Michael King Writer's Fellowship. She lives in Wellington with her husband and son.

Ghosts. Dreams. Haunted houses. Storm wracked landscapes. Thunder, lightning, rain, mud and a corpse on the Takaka Hill road. The flash of thunder and artillery, Flanders mud and corpses of seventy years ago. In the one text Elizabeth Knox weaves a marvellously compelling tale of the supernatural and of the ordinary. - M.G. Hitching, Otago Daily Times The author has done more than research the subject of front-line warfare thoroughly. She has internalised it all, and is able to bring it back out of her own imagination like the memory of a personal experience. - Margaret Mahy, NZ Listener