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  • Published: 29 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9780143507338
  • Imprint: Picture Puffin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $22.00

Grandad's Wheelies




When Jack visits his grandparents, they tell him stories - each outdoing the other with a tale taller and wilder than the last.

When Jack visits his grandparents, they tell him stories - each outdoing the other with a tale taller and wilder than the last.

When Jack visits his grandparents, there's no television to entertain him. No internet, no mobile phone, no tablets. In fact, there's no technology or modern distractions at all. But he still likes to visit, because Grandad and Granny tell him stories - each trying to outdo the other with a tale taller and wilder than the last.

Did you ever hear about the dragon of Waitemata harbour?
Or the bridge between the North and South islands?
Or why the Beehive is round in shape - and who REALLY made the Marlborough Sounds?

And then there's the pumpkin larger than a garden shed, and a wheelbarrow that converts into a boat for a seasick kangaroo. There are lost false teeth, eels and the ingenious invention of the world's first rotary clothesline helicopter . . . and a flying train that touches down at the station in Nelson.

With equally wild watercolour illustrations throughout by Bob Kerr, Grandad's Wheelies is a hilarious, rollicking yarn stitching together a picture of life in New Zealand a couple of generations back that is just about true.

Jack can't get enough of his Grandad and Granny's stories - and readers young and old will love them too!

  • Published: 29 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9780143507338
  • Imprint: Picture Puffin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $22.00

About the author

Jack Lasenby

Jack Lasenby (1931–2019) was one of our finest writers for children. He was ‘perhaps the most innately New Zealand writer of all New Zealand writers for children,’ as Margaret Mahy said in a NZ Listener feature in 2005.

He wrote of heartland New Zealand – small towns, farms, and the bush, of the Depression era, as well as futuristic novels of great depth. He was ‘observant, erudite, witty and often caustic’. His novels inspired Judith Holloway to rank him with Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee as ‘children’s writers whose themes, originality and sheer literariness makes them almost as important and entertaining to adults’ (NZ Books).

John Marsden wrote of Lasenby’s post-apocalypse title Because We Were the Travellers, that it was ‘Intense, vivid, poetic – a cruel and beautiful book’.

Jack Lasenby was born in Waharoa, New Zealand in 1931. During the 1950s he was a deer-culler and possum trapper in the Ureweras. He later lived in Wellington and Paremata, where he raised his daughter and step-children in a cottage by the water, and worked as a school teacher, a lecturer in English at the Wellington Teachers’ College, and editor of the School Journal. With friends Sam Hunt and Ian Riggir he published poems on an old printing press.

Jack Lasenby was awarded many fellowships, including the Writer’s Fellowship at the Victoria University of Wellington, the Writer in Residence at the Dunedin College of Education and the Sargeson Fellowship in Auckland. He was awarded the prestigious Margaret Mahy Medal in 2003 and the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book in 2012 for his first collection of stories, Uncle Trev. The Jack Lasenby Award was established by the Wellington Book Association in 2002. He was awarded Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for his fiction in 2014

Over his writing career he authored more than 30 books for children, which include the Aunt Effie series, the Uncle Trev titles, ‘The Sedden Street Gang’ trilogy, ‘The Travellers’ quartet and the Harry Wakatipu books. He was the recipient many times over of the most highly regarded children’s book awards: the Esther Glen Medal, the Aim Children’s Book Award, and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Award.

His award-winning books include The Lake, The Conjuror, The Waterfall, The Battle of Pook Island, Because We Were the Travellers and most recently, in 2009, the New Zealand Post Junior Fiction Award for Old Drumble and in 2012, the New Zealand Post Young Adult Fiction Award for Calling the Gods.

The characters who inhabit Lasenby’s stories vary enormously: from the anarchic and street-smart gang in Dead Man’s Head to the hilarious and ludicrous, lazy pack-horse Harry Wakatipu; from the green-canvas-invalid’s-pyjama-wearing Aunt Effie who leads her 26 nieces and nephews on a wild ark ride over the Vast Untrodden Ureweras to the lone boy and old woman who are the Travellers.

Jack Lasenby lived his final years in Te Aro in Wellington, where he tended a flourishing garden for many years, and wrote and read prolifically. He died in September 2019 at the age of 88.

Also by Jack Lasenby

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Praise for Grandad's Wheelies

Appropriately dedicated to all grannies and grandads who tell stories, Grandad's Wheelies centres on Jack and his tall-story-telling grandparents, who love nothing more than claiming improbable victories and winding each other up. There are the stories of how Grandad invented roads and Granny invented rail; of how Rangitoto Island is actually a sleeping dragon; what Granny did to Grandad when she caught him placing an illegal bet with a bookie, and many, many more. They're old-fashioned stories with a true Kiwi feel. One for reading with the grandparents.

Laura Hewson, Otago Daily Times

Awards & recognition

Storylines Notable Junior Fiction Award

Notable Book  •  2017  •  Storylines Notable Book