From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle

Kate De Goldi

Sep 2015 · Sold by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

About this ebook

Meet filmmaker Barney Kettle, who liked to invent stories but found a real one under his nose. Barney Kettle knew he would be a very famous film director one day, he just didn’t know when that day would arrive. He was already an actual director – he’d made four fifteen-minute films – but so far only his schoolmates and the residents of the High Street had viewed them. Global fame was a little way off. It would come, though. Barney was certain about that ... So begins the manuscript written from the hospital bed of an unnamed man. He has written it over many months as he recovers from serious injuries sustained in a city-wide catastrophe. He has written so he can remember the street where he lived, home to a cavalcade of interesting people, singular shops, and curious stories. He has written so he can remember the summer before he was injured, the last days of a vanished world. Above all, he has written so he can remember the inimitable Barney Kettle, filmmaker, part-time dictator, questing brain, theatrical friend; a boy who loved to invent stories but found a real one under his nose; a boy who explored his neighbourhood with camera in hand and stumbled on a mystery that changed everything ... A beautiful story: big-hearted, richly entertaining, powerful. 2016 Storylines Notable Junior Fiction Award and winner of the Esther Glen Award at the 2016 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

About the author

Kate De Goldi was born in 1959 in Christchurch. Kate launched her career in 1988 by winning the American Express Short Story Award, and three years later won the BNZ/Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award. Her first novel, Like You, Really, was published in 1994 under the pseudonym Kate Flannery. Her stories are about contemporary teenagers and their struggle to craft their identity both inside and outside the family dynamic, are set in her native South Island, in Canterbury or Westland. Kate has written three books for young adults: Sanctuary (1996), which won the New Zealand Post Senior Fiction Award and the Esther Glen medal; Love, Charlie Mike, which was short-listed in the 1998 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards, and Closed, Stranger, which took out the Honours Award in the same competition (2000). Kate is a regular reviewer of children's books on National Radio's Kim Hill programme. Her books for young adults are published internationally and regularly feature on school curricula in both New Zealand and across the Tasman. In 2015 her title From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle, made the New Zealand best Seller List.