About Joan Rosier-Jones
Joan Rosier-Jones was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has lived in London (England), Wellington and Auckland and now resides in Wanganui. She began her working career as a teacher and now combines the two loves of her life – writing and teaching. ‘If I’m not writing, the next best thing is to be talking about it,’ Joan says.
She has five novels and to how-to-write books to her name.
Cast Two Shadows
The place is Bastion Point. The time May 1978. Maori Land Rights protesters are about to be evicted after evicted after squatting on the Point for months.
Emma is on the periphery, taking her first slow steps towards accepting the Maori in her.
A visit to Bastion Point triggers memories of her childhood. Her mixed Maori/Yugoslav blood has always made her feel out of place – her Maori relatives called her ‘the Pakeha bastard’ and her Yugoslav relatives did not know she existed.
This novel traces her life through from her traumatic childhood and teenage years to her adult strivings to be accepted as white and middle-class, until the final crisis point in her life when she begins to come to terms with her dual heritage.
Cast Two Shadows is a strong and compelling novel, a passionate portrayal of one woman’s life from childhood to middle age, and one of the first novels to deal honestly with the complex question of mixed Pakeha/Maori ancestry.
Voyagers
Voyagers is an historical novel spanning the years 1906-1942, a family saga brimming with life and incident.
In 1887 Willy Svenson, a Finnish sailor, is shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand. He cannot afford to repatriate himself and is forced to remain in New Zealand. In time he marries a young working-class woman, jess. Together they raise three children in the rough railroad camps improvised for workers pushing the Main Trunk line through from Auckland to Wellington.
In the second part of Voyagers, the action shifts to the splendidly evoked world of London before the First World War. We meet Alf, a boy of six, whose life is chronicled through a tragi-comic decline in family circumstances. In his teens he runs away to sea. Eventually he reaches New Zealand and meets the Svenson family…
Voyagers is a story of the lives of finely drawn and wonderfully realistic characters, all engaged on voyages of discovery. It is also a powerful statement about the nature of the people who have made New Zealand what it is, about the development of political awareness, and above all. About the changing nature of relationships between men and women.
Canterbury Tales
A special carriage has been put on the Dunedin to Christchurch train for those attending the Christchurch Arts festival and Michael, the guard, is in charge – or thinks he is.
Little does he know what is going on in the minds of the passengers: that the cherubic-looking schoolgirl is dreaming of sacrificial orgies and sexual rites, and someone else is plotting a murder. As the train rattles across the Canterbury Plains we meet a rich assortment of characters, including a married woman hoping to meet her Swedish lover, a young man who has just won a million dollars, and a lecherous MP.
Michael has a terrible time trying to keep them all under control, and when they finally gather together at the Grand Hotel, the result is a mixture of comedy, romance, tragedy and pathos, in best Chaucerian tradition. …And for the reader, travelling on a train will never seem quite the same again.
Mother Tongue
Tom Hastings has done all the wrong things for the right reasons. As the Waitangi Tribunal lumbers ineffectually on decade after decade; as political systems fail and the populace makes their demands felt, he seizes power and takes his Great Revenge. He decrees that Maori is the only official language and its use is mandatory for the citizens of this future Aotearoa New Zealand. Mother Tongue looks at the lives of a small, disparate group of people who are caught in the net of this Ngaki Nui. Denied the use of the own language, they live in the fearful and claustrophobic atmosphere of their urban guesthouse, with little outside contact. They are all as much victims of their own fears as they are of the dictatorship they live under, until one day a knock at the door changes everything.
Yes
Dublin 1990. Dana and Susan, friends since childhood and now in their thirties, are reunited after ten years separation. Dana was always the extrovert, living at full speed while Susan is inhibited, unmarried and has never ventured far from home. But Dana, stricken with cancer, is now in hospice care having returned from Australia to die. As Susan watches over her they explore their past and their love for the same man. Susan is torn between envy of Dana’s achievements, ideal husband and beautiful children, and regret – for the past and the all too short future. But as time runs out for Dana, Susan’s despair is transformed.
Yes is a sensitively crafted story about living, loving and letting go.