The Gorse Blooms Pale : Dan Davin's Southland Stories

Dan Davin - a Rhodes scholar, and for many years and one of New Zealand's acknowledged masters of the short story - was born in Invercargill, New Zealand in 1914. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in early twentieth-century Southland. Comic, haunting, compelling, poetic, lyrical, and entertaining, these stories have a regional flavor quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of an idiosyncratic rural community - its post-British social relationships and tribulations - with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton, or Marshall. The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.