Uncrowded, spectacularly natural Stewart Island is a popular holiday destination with many bush walks and a wealth of natural and built features to enjoy, including New Zealand’s 14th and newest national park, rare and special birdlife, numerous historic sites and magnificent scenery.

Dunedin City and its environs are home to an amazing range of habitats, landscapes, plants, animals, birds, insects and geological features. This well-illustrated book introduces a magnificent natural environment, extending from a sea coast inhabited by albatrosses, penguins, sea lions, dolphins and whales to a harsh but biodiverse alpine zone on inland mountains.

An intoxicating blend of Antarctic exploration in the ‘Heroic Era’ and the world of Scotch whisky, this book gives the full story behind the cases of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt that were rediscovered under the hut of Ernest Shackleton’s 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition 100 years after an epic attempt at the South Pole.

Dr Lance Richdale has been described as the father of albatross research and a world leader in seabird science generally. His meticulous and long-running studies of the yellow-eyed penguin, royal albatross and other seabirds were both epic and internationally acclaimed. He guarded the albatrosses of Taiaroa Head near Dunedin to ensure the first fledging in 1938 – a colony that thrives there today – and he wrote the world’s first long-term study of a seabird population, A Population Study of Penguins (Oxford University Press 1957).

The Tasman Sea casts a spell on those who venture into it. This book, a publishing ‘first’, tells the Tasman’s life story, from its earthly origins, extraordinary water bodies and strange life forms to its shipping and shipwreck stories, its yachting and heroic crossings, and the varied communities living beside it today.