The Notetaker

A lifetime of notes yielding 63 books including six other memoirs are summed up in a final memoir tracking the hapless journey from failing to train as a priest in Christchurch to disappointing editors in Wellington, Sydney and London. Despite encountering irate actors, menacing authorities in Yugoslavia, Ireland, Scotland and Israel, including a New Zealand prime minister threatening jail, the author managed to accumulate a record that allows him to depict his travels and the people he meets from a proudly vernacular Kiwi perspective which generated nostalgia heritage fact and crime fiction and six bestselling collections of Kiwi slang.