Massey University Press

‘If I’d been asked to vote on it I would’ve said I’d landed at the centre of the universe. Standing on our corner of Sylvan Road and Victoria Street, with Te Mata Peak, the Tukituki River and the mad wilderness of Windsor Park to the back of me and the distinctly nonwilderness of Cornwall Park and the misty vista of the Ruahines in front of me, I was the master of all I could barely survey.’This charming memoir by one of New Zealand’s best-known painters is a love letter to his home town, Hastings, and the weirdly innocent world of the 1950s and early 1960s.

The sixth book in the remarkable korero series, edited by Lloyd Jones, features Jan Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner Whiti Hereaka and the acclaimed artist Peata Larkin, cousins who share the same whakapapa, in a collaboration based on the Fibonacci number sequence. In a feat of managed imagining, Hereaka’s words spiral out to the centre of the book and then back in on themselves to end with the same words with which the text began. As the pattern spools out and then folds back, Peata Larkin’s meticulous drawings of taniko and whakairo and her lush works on silk weave their own entrancing pattern. ‘It is my hope that by the time you have walked that path that you are now a different reader and will read those words in a new way,’ Hereaka says. You Are Here is a beguiling and important addition to the korero series.