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The Hut Builder
  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742532912
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook

The Hut Builder

Formats & editions
EBook
25 July 2012
EBook
27 Sept 2010
Tr. Paperback
27 Sept 2010
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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: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742532912
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
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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
Reach
At The Grand Glacier Hotel
The Quiet Spectacular
See all