The Scornful Moon. A Moralist's Tale.

Paperback original. 8vo. 223 pp. Pictorial stiff card wraps.

Joint runner-up of the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2004 Montana Book Awards. Past winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Britain for his novel Plumb (1978).

A tale of scandal and ignorance set in pre-war New Zealand. "The new novel by distinguished New Zealand writer Maurice Gee is purportedly a crime story, the contemporary account of a 1930s political scandal. Self-proclaimed moralist and novelist manqué Sam Holloway is the unreliable narrator of this slippery and compelling tale; he is also the conduit for Gee's exploration of the ways we use morality to fill the fearful gap between the seen and the unknown." –The Guardian