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Butler's Ringlet
  • Published: 31 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143771715
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Butler's Ringlet

Formats & editions
EBook
31 July 2017
Paperback
26 June 2009
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In this story of male friendship, Fearnley reproduces the cadences and rhythms of rural life and offers insight into a provincial male world seldom explored in recent New Zealand fiction.

Best friends Warwick and Dean live in rural Southland. Dean, a farmer, is single and lonely - if only he'd admit it to himself. Warwick is caught between his love for a place and his love for Sabine and Ecki, his estranged wife and child now living in Germany. Dean observes Warwick's struggle but has problems of his own: a domineering father he neither loves nor respects, and on-going feelings of guilt and grief for his brother.

Suddenly, Sabine and Ecki return to New Zealand, bringing the past with them to threaten the fragile worlds Warwick and Dean have created for themselves.
  • Published: 31 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143771715
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
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About the author

Laurence Fearnley

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2008. In 2016 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and in 2025 At the Grand Glacier Hotel was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 she received the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. She won the NZSA/Janet Frame Memorial Award in 2016 and in 2017 was the joint winner of the Landfall Essay Competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019 and was artist-in-residence at Henderson House, Alexandra, in 2024–25. In 2026 she was awarded the Ireland Wilson Sargeson Fellowship to write the final novel in her Five Senses project. She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
portrait photo of Laurence Fearnley

Also by Laurence Fearnley

Lydia Bradey: Going Up Is Easy
Mother's Day
Edwin and Matilda: An Unlikely Love Story
Scented
The Hut Builder
Winter Time
The Quiet Spectacular
See all

Praise for Butler's Ringlet

. . . these people are as real and individual as anyone you know well, and the country and its fauna are given understated, but unalloyed affection. It's one thing to admire the writing and characterisation in Butler's Ringlet, and I certainly do; and another thing to get pulled along by the narrative towards an unpredictable denouement, and I certainly did.

Gordon McLauchlan, NZ Herald

Fearnley is a meticulous and lyrical recorder of the natural landscape.

Margot Schwass, NZ Books