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  • Published: 27 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781742287683
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

The Hut Builder




It was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen and I didn't have the words to describe it. I felt it though. I let out an incredible whoop of joy and skipped into the air, laughing and laughing; there was so much joy inside me. For the first time in all my memory, I could not contain myself.

As a boy in the early 1940s, young Boden Black finds his life changed for ever the day his neighbour Dudley drives him over the hills into the vast snow-covered plains of the Mackenzie country. Unexpectedly his world opens up and he discovers a love of landscape and a fascination with words that will guide him throughout his life, as he forges a career as a butcher and poet, spends a joyous summer building a hut on the slopes of Mount Cook and climbs to the summit in the company of Sir Edmund Hillary.

A moving exploration of one man's journey and the events which shape him, The Hut Builder is also an evocative celebration of the mountain world and the wonder of life.
Also available as an eBook

  • Published: 27 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781742287683
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Laurence Fearnley

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. In 2014 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and, in 2008, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019. She lives in Dunedin.

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