By Stevan-Eldred Grigg.

Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It’s the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valerie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is the well-spoken son of a landed family. They already have three kids. Gilbert has just taken a job as paymaster at a coal mine. The family is about to start life in a green and black and red township on the West Coast.

A little boy is born, almost in a taxi, and named Stevan.

Green Grey Rain tells the story of the first years of that little boy. A story told by Stevan. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by Valerie – who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles. A story of working and playing, dreaming and singing, crying and laughing, hoping and wishing, bush, rain, rust, and the sooty streets of Blackball.

Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning writer, author of some of the best-selling works of New Zealand history and of leading New Zealand novels. His works of fiction and non-fiction explore the West Coast, Canterbury, the wider South Island and the whole of New Zealand. He also writes about Samoa, Shanghai, Mexico and Australia.

Published in NZ by Piwaiwaka Press on paper from sustainably managed forests. Free shipping within NZ.