I think you know where New Zealand is. (Though amusingly there is a whole Wikipedia page about maps that forget to include it.) It has been inhabited by humans only since about 1380 CE, the last significant chunk of habitable land on the planet to be infested by Homo sapiens. British settlers arrived in the early nineteenth century and it became a British colony, then a Dominion, and then fully independent under the 1931 Statute of Westminster (though this was not adopted until 1947).

New Zealand is a constitutional monarchy with Charles III as head of state and a Governor-General. The Labour and National Parties have alternated in power for the last 90 years. Recent prime ministers include Jacinta Ardern. I got a nice photograph of her at last year’s Paris Peace Forum.

I have never been there myself, though I was the Deputy Hugo Administrator for CoNZealand, the 2020 Worldcon, which was forced to transform into a virtual event due to the pandemic.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in New Zealand. 

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Luminaries	Eleanor Catton	87,734	5,956	11,704
When We Believed in Mermaids	Barbara O’Neal	250,680	1,119	14,554
Birnam Wood	Eleanor Catton	57,761	1,801	12,151
The Bone People	Keri Hulme	24,701	4,195	3,344
Greta & Valdin	Rebecca K. Reilly	35,805	421	12,695
The Whale Rider	Witi Ihimaera	13,253	1,612	2,873
A Different Kind of Power	Jacinda Ardern	22,577	281	3,164
In the Land of the Long White Cloud	Sarah Lark	22,427	609	999

This week’s winner, The Luminaries, was second on Goodreads and only fourth on StoryGraph, but a strong showing on LibraryThing secured it the top spot. It is the only one that I have read, a story of passion and crime in 1860s New Zealand. The same author’s Birnam Wood is about climate activists in a contemporary setting.

When We Believed in Mermaids, which won on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is about an American woman who goes to New Zealand in search of her long-lost sister, presumed dead for many years.

The Bone People, which somewhat controversially won the Booker Prize in 1985, is about a woman, a man and a child getting to know each other on and off the South Island. By all accounts it is pretty disturbing.

Greta & Valdin is about two queer siblings living in contemporary Auckland. I must say that it sounds like the one I would most like to read of the seven that I haven’t.

The Whale Rider is a Māori myth retold by a contemporary Māori writer.

A Different Kind of Power is Jacinta Ardern’s political autobiography, the only non-fiction on this week’s list.

In the Land of the Long White Cloud, by German writer Sarah Lark (real name Christiane Gohl) is a nineteenth-century tale of two young English women immigrants to New Zealand.

This is the ninth country where seven out of eight books are by women; the others are Finland, Jordan, Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained Jacinta Ardern and lost another non-fiction book, Island of the Lost by Joan Druett, which is set on the Auckland Islands (a long way off at sea, but under New Zealand sovereignty).

I was sorry to disqualify The Garden Path (and other stories) by Katherine Mansfield, arguably New Zealand’s greatest writer, but less than half of its content is set there (six out of fifteen stories).

Thanks to the 2021 Worldcon, I ended up with a number of sf books set in New Zealand on my virtual shelves, of which the one I enjoyed most was T.L. Wood’s collection, Dark Winds over Wellington. The other story to flag up is Charles Sheffield’s Hugo and Nebula winner, “Georgia on my Mind“.

Coming next: Costa Rica, Kuwait, Panama and Croatia.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong | Singapore | Lebanon | Palestine | Oman
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua | Paraguay | El Salvador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya | Liberia | Mauritania
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus | Bulgaria | Serbia | Denmark | Norway | Finland | Slovakia | Ireland
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea