Böcker utgivna av Robert Philip Bolton

In a park in an antipodean city in the 1930s a teenaged boy starts work as an apprentice nurseryman.It's an idyllic world. Patient and unhurried, with a pace as predictable as the seasons. A miniature version of the pre-war colonial empire lying just beyond the park gates. But as secure as the park may seem it can't protect anyone, least of all Tommy, from the changing world outside.There's a war coming. An unwanted baby and heartbreaking changes at home. Through it all the park is a constant. A companion, a teacher, a home and a friend. With it he grows, learning wisdom and patience, as the park brings him friendship, love, knowledge and family. Friendships that will take him far away from home; family that will nurture him throughout his life; and the knowledge to finally understand the park's mysterious white gate.

Nothing much ever happens in Robinson Street, Blythewillow, and for Phyllis, Graham, Karen, Charlie Downs and Monkey Oldfield, and most of the other residents of the New Zealand town, that's just the way they like it.With The Arclight cinema, The Record Reign, Wake's butchers, the garden, and Monkey Oldfield's brand new chicken coop, the residents of Robinson Street have everything they need. So when Clint appears in the garden one night and tells Phyllis that it's all about to change she doesn't know what to think.Within days there are changes at The Arclight, and Clint's isn't the only ghost making its presence felt. Long forgotten events from the past bring visitors from the outside world; from the city, Australia and from Los Angeles, with news, offers and veiled threats.Are these the changes promised by Clint? And can the residents of Blythewillow save their town's bucolic charm?Only time will tell as Karen and Graham and Jehoiada Hartsfield - the charming young city lawyer - peel back the layers of Blythewillow's forgotten history to discover Clint's secret treasure.

My Marian Year is about the daily life of a ten-year-old boy growing up in a Catholic working class family in suburban Auckland, New Zealand, in 1954. The story's interest lies in the way the narrator, John 'Johnny Boy' Little, gives us the petty details of his simple life, and of Catholic life, in the 'fifties, month-by-month, and how he - curious and sceptical - saw and related to his family, school, church, shops and the people of the Auckland neighbourhood he called home. That everyone and everything in his little life during this one year was so undistinguished, ordinary and typical of the times - except perhaps in its climax - means that the modern reader receives a simple, unvarnished, plain-language taste of life in the suburban New Zealand of the past. As a result My Marian Year appeals equally to the old and young: the old recognize themselves in the story, with poignant reminders of their own childhood, while the young are fascinated if not astonished by how much life in New Zealand has changed in just fifty-odd years. My Marian Year takes its title from the fact that Pope Pius XII declared that 1954 was to be dedicated to the Virgin Mary and called a 'Marian Year'. Catholics all over the world were then required to direct their devotions to the Virgin Mary throughout the year, in particular by daily praying the rosary.

Early in the twenty-first century a series of viruses killed eighty percent of the world's population. Famine loomed.In New Zealand there was plenty of food but too few people to process it. The surviving city folk therefore fled to the countryside where they provided labour to the remaining farmers in return for a share of the food they helped produce. As a result the country's towns and cities were abandoned.Into this vacuum came the invading Vandiers, so numerous and wealthy they dominated the small Kiwiland population whose traditions, culture, religion and language they despised.The Fable of Flitcroft Point is set in a typical Kiwiland village where, in 2177, the land-grabbing Vandier government has taken village land for its own purposes. The Kiwilanders, angry and frustrated, want their land back. But can their feeble protest succeed against the overwhelming power of central government?