Book description
A young man leaves home a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter, to travel
the world. He returns to New Zealand changed almost beyond recognition.
Along the way he meets nine people who influence his life and help make
him the writer he becomes. James McNeish's Touchstones has a cast of
characters who include 'the Mother Courage of the English theatre', an
anti-Mafia reformer in Sicily, a Kanak revolutionary who is
assassinated, a rejected cousin and 'Mr Punch in naval uniform', the New
Zealand poet Denis Glover. All are larger than life. Some of them, like
the author's mysterious Maori aunt, are good enough to bottle. The book
is witty, poignant and in the words of its editor, Emma Neale, 'rich in
astonishing anecdote'. It is at once a self-portrait, a hymn to a
vanishing New Zealand, and the first time James McNeish has written
about himself. The author of more than twenty books and plays, James
McNeish has received a number of awards and fellowships. His novels
include Mackenzie and Lovelock and his non-fiction The Sixth Man and The
Dance of the Peacocks.
