Alastair Carthew

The Narcissist, The Femme Fatale And a Girl Named Jacinda is Alastair Carthew's fifth self published novel on Amazon. The others are: Proud, a Tale of Rampant Ludicrousness (2019), Divines Choice; After the Windsors, it’s ALL BLACK (2021), The Timid Bookseller (2022) and And Off He Went (2025).

Carthew's books are set mainly in New Zealand, but also Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. He has completed a memoir, Diana Khan, A Memoir, still awaiting publication in Australia. He is a former chief parliamentary reporter for TVNZ, managing director of Consultus public relations, corporate communications manager at TVNZ, Wellington City Council, Air New Zealand and the Star Alliance airline alliance. He co-ordinated the Star Alliance environmental programme, Biosphere Connections, for three years. He was New Zealand correspondent for Newsweek magazine and The Christian Science Monitor international newspaper in the 1980s.

In 1981 Carthew was chairman of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. In Thailand he has contributed newspaper columns to the Phuket Gazette and Phuket News, lifestyle stories for Thailand Tatler, Prestige and several luxury yachting magazines. As a consultant in Asia he worked for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation NGO advising on public relations and journalism in Cambodia, Myanmar, and China, and moderating seminars in Thailand, Japan and Indonesia. During that time he wrote and co-edited books on environmental journalism, social media and elections, political polling in Asia/Pacific, and researched and edited the Asia Media Directory for Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

Carthew's family owned bookshop, Carthew's for Books, traded in Feilding for four generations across 115 years. He is retired and live in Phuket, Thailand, with his New Zealand wife, Lyn. He has two children and four grandchildren.