Time runs backwards in this exhilarating novel from the author of the award-winning The Curative. The Montague family is traced back in time from Petone, Wellington, in the present day, to the amazing case of Anne Green, who in 1650 is executed in Oxford, England, but then miraculously recovers on the dissection table.

When the Captain find us stowaways and give us the choice between join the island or join the crew, all of us to a man cry island! island! So he put us ashore with a few provisions and a trypot and sail away. After escaping from the Norfolk Island penal colony on a sealing ship, Bloodworth and his three fellow convicts are left on a remote southern island by a captain who promises to pick them up in a year's time. It will be many years before they see another ship. During that time four men, with nothing in common but a desire to escape and a need to survive, live together in cramped and freezing isolation. Slangam believes hard work will see them through, Toper puts his faith in the Divine, Gargantua leans on his learning and Bloodworth watches – both his fellow felons and the inhospitable environment. Based on the true story of four convicts who spent more than nine years on the Snares Islands in the early nineteenth century, Charlotte Randall's latest novel is a...

'I always been a coin boy . . .' � Hokitika, 1865, at the height of the Gold Rush. In a town with a hundred pubs, young Halfie - aka Harvey, Thumbsucker, Bedwetter, Cocoa and Pipsqueak - gets by as best he can. � Most of the time he hangs around the Bathsheba pub, washing dishes, running errands and making the odd coin - and observing from close quarters the parade of miners, dancing girls, petty crims and plain drunks that passes through the doors. � When you're a coin boy you see a lot of life, and from low down. But how much do you really understand? What's going on in young Halfie's world? � In this beguiling new novel by the author of The Curative, a rattling good yarn reveals that life is rarely what it seems. � 'Among our contemporary writers of adult fiction, only Elizabeth Knox can match Charlotte Randall for the sheer scope of her imagination.'-New Zealand Listener

In a village café in Crete, 1981, a young backpacker is befriended by a troubled New Zealander, Henry Davis. He reveals that his daughter Sally vanished from the island two years earlier and he has come to Crete to explore the baffling circumstances of her disappearance. For Davis there are painful unanswered questions. What happened to Sally? Who was to blame for her mysterious disappearance? Was it an accident? Davis soon has to confront the painful possibility that Sally herself may have planned a deliberate flight from a too-protective father. And who was the real Sally?From the author of the award-winning The Curative, The Crocus Hour is a spellbinding journey through shifting passages of time, posing questions about how well we really know those close to us.