Hartill PR

Get your seatbelts on and prepare yourself for the hilarious, shocking, tell-all tale of Willy de Wit – one of Aotearoa’s best-known comedians. From running riot in sell-out stand-up shows all over New Zealand with Funny Business, and starring in the multi-series eponymously named TV show, to his long tenure as one of the original Radio Hauraki ‘Morning Pirates’ presenters, Willy’s life was one fun ride… until it really really wasn’t.

New Zealand will be the first country in the world to publish the most anticipated novel of 2023 – Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – on 9 February. Birnam Wood is a gripping thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, a novel of epic scope and imagination that catapulted the Aotearoa writer to global stardom, selling 1.5 million copies worldwide, publishing in 32 languages. 

With a reporter’s and historian’s eye, award-winning author Redmer Yska presents Katherine Mansfield in metaphorical technicolour, revealing details of her life in Europe – her happy place where she produced her finest work – to a contemporary audience for the first time.

Histories of Hate, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley, is a landmark work exploring intolerance and extremism in Aotearoa New Zealand. It looks critically at the motivations behind the country’s radical right activity, and in doing so, identifies patterns over time.

Internationally lauded New Zealand writer Catherine Chidgey, whose latest novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022, returns with The Axeman’s Carnival. Comic, profound, poetic and true, it is Chidgey at her finest. A fast-paced novel, its building sense of menace will keep readers gripped and guessing right to the end.

You and most people around you are likely to be in the wealthiest 1% who have ever lived.

Life is great, so why doesn’t it feel that way?

Comparonomics explains why life is much better than you think it is. It offers some unexpected reasons why many of us feel bad about our lives, and the state of the world, and introduces some surprisingly simple tools to make us feel a lot better.