Containing stimulating and insightful essays on eight of the country's best novels, this collection of critical essays examines how New Zealand fiction has redefined traditional means of storytelling, inviting readers into a new malleable world where identities are negotiable, liberated from time and place. Explaining the most pressing themes of New Zealand's modern fiction, this volume illuminates the distinctive ways in which contemporary novels approach the relationship between the real and the imaginary with edgy authenticities that operate between the familiar and the foreign, the copy and the original, the fake and the genuine, the intention and the act.