You may have seen this video making the rounds—we discovered it through Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and quickly discovered The Rumpus had featured it as well—but those of you who haven’t seen it yet are in for a treat. After watching the short film, produced by the New Zealand Book Council, we wanted to learn more about the author who inspired it, Maurice Gee, and we found a very helpful page on the NZBC website, but we also discovered that almost nothing of Gee’s work seems to be in print in the U.S. at the moment—save for two novels for younger readers, The Fire Raiser (first published in 1986, with an American edition in 2007) and Salt, the first volume in a new fantasy trilogy.
It looks like a trip to the library may be in order, to see if Gee’s novels have been published in the United States and allowed to fall out of print; it does seem odd to us that an author hailed as “[one] of New Zealand’s greatest living artists,” let alone one of its “most significant writers,” should have such a small literary footprint here.