Half My Life
Diana Noonan
OneTree House
pub. 2020

30 March , 2021

Award-winning New Zealand author Diana Noonan uses her latest novel to touch delicately and with grace on the sensitive topics of fragility in families, perfection, mental health, disability, and gender and sexual identity. What a list! All these could individually be the main theme for the novel, but are woven together into a not-too-preachy or educational, but still very ‘woke’, book!

Noonan uses the storyline to ensure that the character with a physical disability is not unintentionally ‘othered’ or negatively spotlighted; in any misguided attempt to educate or normalise the idea of disability in the world around us.  Read more

Half My Life
Diana Noonan
OneTree House
pub. 2020

1 Feb, 2021

Katie Papahajis feels like a stranger in her own life. Her father left Greece at a young age to live in New Zealand and open a Greek fish & chip shop, yet speaks nothing of the time before New Zealand – and nothing of his family. Her mother is projecting happiness while trying and failing to keep their three-person-family from falling apart, and there always seems to be something lurking beneath that tranquil facade of normality. All the while Katie’s heart and mind have been suffering through doubt and uncertainty for so long – because, after all, if her own parents couldn’t emotionally love her, how could anyone else?  Read more