The Axeman’s Carnival

Tama is a helpless magpie chick when Marnie saves him on the South Island sheep station she runs with her husband Rob, a farmer and champion axeman, who threatens to wring the bird's neck if it disturbs his sleep. But Tama can speak, and as word of him spreads he offers the hard-up couple a way forward. From the pine trees his father warns him how cruel people are; in the kitchen Marnie confides how Rob hurts her. Told by the magpie, whose words to humans are mostly comic gibberish, the story moves between the birds' world and the people's, funny and full of mounting dread, on its way to the yearly Axeman's Carnival.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

352 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Nature (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand

First published

2022 by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Author's age

52 when first published

ISBN

9781776920051 (Te Herenga Waka University Press, New Zealand)

9781787704619 (Europa Editions, United Kingdom)

9781787705517 (Europa Editions, United Kingdom)

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Wikidata