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A Land of Two Halves - the Return

  • Oct 24, 2024

A revised and updated edition of Joe Bennett's A Land of Two Halves will be in bookshops from early November 2024.


Originally published in 2003, and now with four new chapters, this tale of a hitchhiking tour of New Zealand remains a vivid, frank and comic portrait of a paradoxical country.


Twenty years ago Joe Bennett hitchhiked the length and breadth of New Zealand. The result was A Land of Two Halves, a portrait of the country and its many contradictions that is as telling today as it was then.


For as Joe says in his reintroduction to this classic road trip, the name of the All Black first five may have changed but there is still an All Black first five, the waves still thump against Hokitika beach and the debate still rages over the Treaty of Waitangi.


In 2024, Joe, now a superannuitant, dusted off his thumb once more and headed for the one part of the country he missed twenty years ago. The result is four new chapters bringing the story delightfully up to date.



Joe Bennett - A Land of Two Halves

Book Details

  • ISBN: 9781775492986

  • ISBN 10: 1775492982

  • Imprint: HarperCollins

  • On Sale: 30/10/2024

  • Pages: 336

  • RRP:$17.99 NZD

  • BISAC1 :TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues

  • BISAC2 :TRAVEL / Australia & Oceania

  • BISAC3 :HUMOR / Topic / Travel

  • BISAC4 :BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

  • BISAC5 :HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand



From There to Here Published

  • May 3, 2023

FROM THERE TO HERE published by Harper Collins.


The first 30 years – the informative ones – of one of New Zealand most popular columnists and commentators.


A childhood of fishing, cricket, dogs, games, friends, school, mild molestation, the odd death. The usual stuff. Then the long-haired gloom and vehemence of adolescence, moody, transgressional, writhing with love and sex, the intensity of which eventually receded, but which has continued as a sort of background hiss for the next fifty years.


Joe's famously irreverent prose has been published in more than 20 books. This, his first memoir, confronts and reflects on the journey from childhood to manhood, and his long and fruitless struggle against teaching for a living.

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