So Brilliantly Clever - Peter Graham Awa Press $42.00

"On June 22, 1954, in the depth of a southern winter, teenage friends Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a park with Pauline's mother. Half an hour later the girls returned alone. Honorah Parker lay in a sea of blood on a lonely track. She had been savagely murdered. In this mesmerising book, lawyer and true crime writer Peter Graham tells the whole story for the first time, giving a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial, dramatic revelations about the fate of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker after their release from prison and their strange lives today, and a penetrating insight into the crime using modern psychology."

Nearly 60 years after the fact, former lawyer Peter Graham dissects New Zealand’s fascination with the Parker-Hulme murder.

June 22, 1954, Juliet Hulme (15) sneaks a half-brick from her Ilam home into her shoulder bag before heading to the home of close friend Pauline Parker (16). Once there the pair slip the brick in a stocking and hide it in the bag again. They have a ‘pleasant lunch’ with Pauline’s family, before taking the bus with Pauline’s mother, Honorah, up Christchurch’s Port Hills to Victoria Park.

On the Adventures of the CoffeeBar Kid on Thursday Night -

My guest tonite is Marina Lewycka writer of several well known novels, including her latest 'Various Various Pets Alive and Dead.  Also Larry Love from Alabama 3 and the usual assortment of new music and chaos.  The Adventures of the CoffeeBar Kid - Thursday nights from 7.30 - only on Groove 107.7FM.

My guest tonite is Marina Lewycka, whose new novel Various Pets, Alive and Deadis due out shortly. 

Lewycha was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany after World War II. Her family subsequently moved to England where she now lives. She graduated from Keele University in 1968 with BA in English and Philosophy and from the University of York with a BPhil in English Literature in 1969. She began, but did not complete, a PhD at King's College London.

She currently works as a lecturer in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University.

Lewycka's debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian won the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing at the Hay literary festival, the 2005/6 Waverton Good Read Award, the 2005 Saga Award for Wit; it was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction^. The novel has been translated into over twenty-nine languages, including Romanian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Russian, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, and Catalan.

Lewycka said in a 2008 interview that she would have been happy to write a sequel to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian after the initial book's success but was advised against doing so. Instead she wrote her second novel Two Caravans, which was published in hardback in March 2007 by Fig Tree (Penguin Books) for the United Kingdom market, and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing.  In the United States and Canada it is published under the title Strawberry Fields.

Lewycka's third novel We Are All Made of Glue was released in July 2009.
In 2009, she donated the short story "The Importance of Having Warm Feet" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Lewycka's story was published in the 'Earth' collection.

Later the same year, she donated a second short story, "Business Philosophy", to the Amnesty International anthology Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In addition to her fiction, Lewycka has written a number of books giving practical advice for carers of elderly people, published by the charity Age Concern.