Stephanie Johnson is a prize-winning novelist who is also known for her plays and poetry. Stephanie has written nine novels, many of which are published internationally, and is also a scriptwriter for television and film. Her latest novel is Swimmers’ Rope (2008). She co-founded the Auckland Writers Festival with Peter Wells in 1999.
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BOOKS
Belief
In 1899 William McQuiggan leaves his young Australian wife and new-born twins in New Zealand and travels to America in search of God. Belief is the story of his journey and of his marriage to Myra, who follows him from Auckland, to Salt Lake City, Utah, and to Zion City, Illinois. With each leg of the journey the family grows until William is the reluctant father of six, and Myra's understanding of her husband deepens and matures. Belief is a vivid evocation of a way of life that has passed, a tale told on a grand scale: the story spans seventeen years, three countries and three religions. More than that, it is the story of how love and patience may triumph over violence and despair. In this compelling novel, spanning several continents and over thirty years, Stephanie Johnson returns to her vivid portrayal of the past, which won her such acclaim with The Heart's Wild Surf. It is a moving and amusing novel, intelligent and enthralling, and beautifully written.
The Shag Incident
The people who committed the act of revenge in 1985 thought it was perfectly executed. Twenty years on the truth is revealed, the truth about the deception that started it all and the seemingly disparate characters involved: Jasper, currently in Sydney's Long Bay Prison; psychiatrist Franca Todisco; New Zealand journalist Richard Brunel visiting Paris with society girlfriend Michaela; Lena now living on Waiheke Island with her girlfriend Scottie; and the young biographer Melody Argyle, working on a life of her intensely private subject, ex-All Black and millionaire block-buster novelist Howard Shag. What happened that connects them? The Shag Incident is a novel about love, responsibility, guilt and revenge. Comic , savage, and multi-layed, this is a provocative extension to this versatile writer's oeuvre. Darkly satirical and wickedly funny, this novel takes a tilt at a range of contemporary matters, including sexual stereotyping, militant feminism, the machismo of the All Blacks, new age beliefs, psychiatry, womb burial and naming ceremonies.
Music from a Distant Room
A fortnight after jazz pianist Carl Tyler's funeral, Tamara has one week to go before she leaves New Zealand to return to her native Chicago. Nola wants to solve the mystery of her son's death, to know everything Tamara can tell her, so she begins to tell Carl's lover about the time surrounding her son's conception, his childhood and his early love of music, in the hope that Tamara will remember. Nola is a dental nurse in the 1960s, living with her colourful mother Peg. Her life revolves around her spotless dental clinic at the local school, the 'murder house' the kids call it. She doesn't know it, but by taking an interest in young Brett's bruises, and meeting his father Bernie, her life will be changed for ever. Forty years later, Nola has long since left dentistry behind. She reads palms now, fortune-telling. At the funeral of her son Carl, Nola tells Tamara, Carl's blind American girlfriend, about that time long ago, when she first met Bernie and her son was conceived. The son who was blind also but with a love for music that surpassed sight and gave him a vision uniquely his own.
'Immensely satisfying, utterly believable, Music From A Distant Room is Stephanie Johnson in top form. She has written the year to date's best New Zealand novel'
- Warwick Roger, North and South
Drowned Sprat and Other Stories
Best known for her well-loved and prize-winning novels, Stephanie Johnson also writes superb short stories, plays and poetry. Written over the last sixteen years, this collection of twenty-three stories show the breadth of Stephanie's writing. It features her poignant insights as well as her sharp wit, with characters as diverse as a woman arranging a second wife for her husband, a criminal returning to the care of his mother, and a widow who hears an octopus call her name. There are new and old favourites here; New Zealand stories and stories set overseas, reflecting back on our perspectives and lifestyle. There are fables and ghost stories, tales of the young and old. This is a book to dip into and devour.
John Tomb's Head
John Tomb saw more of the world than most Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. From England to Australia to New Zealand, he led a life of adventure and romance. Two hundred years after his death, his tattooed head is discovered in an American museum. His spirit reawakened, John Tomb wryly observes those who would lay claim to his relic. Among others, there's the New Zealand delegation headed by the Prime Minister and including Tomb's Maori descendants, a leading historian, a prominent carver, the Diplomatic Protection Squad and the Prime Minister's fifteen-year-old daughter. From England come Tomb's English descendants and supporters, eager to take the head back to the land of his birth and their family museum. There is also a wealthy private collector and his clever wife. Returning to the biting and hilarious satire of contemporary New Zealand that Stephanie Johnson conveyed so well in the prize-winning The Shag Incident, this is a daring, astute and rollicking novel from one of our foremost writers.
'John Tomb's Head is a thought-provoking work, continually surprising, with many brilliant moments'
- Iain Sharp, Sunday Star Times
Swimmer's Rope
Friends since childhood, Norman and Lyn grow up as next-door neighbours in Herne Bay at the turn of the twentieth century. When Lyn is sent to manage a central North Island timber mill at the tender age of fourteen, Norman goes to visit him. There he is forced to confront a mysterious adult truth. Later, in their twenties, the two men commit an act so appalling that it ruptures their friendship for many years. In 1972 the elderly Norman meets a young woman in a pub. Burdened by the memory he must at long last assuage, he presses Bronwyn into becoming his unwilling confessor. Swimmers' Rope is a powerful novel about friendship, guilt and sex and our changing notions of loyalty and culpability.
'Johnson's writing is skilful, insightful, witty and she has a truly light touch.'
- Margie Thomson, The New Zealand Herald