Winner of the Tasmania Prize and the Deutz Medal for fiction this is a singular melding of history and imagination.

In August 1905 a party of young men boarded a ship for England. Among them were four farmers, two bootmakers and a boatbuilder. They set out from Auckland, never dreaming they would conquer the world. By December they were the 'wonderful All Blacks' who had beaten Yorkshire, England and Ireland.

They were a tribe far from home, weary, bedazzled, a little lost-but the world showed them wonders: the Eiffel Tower, snow on Tierra del Fuego, English lords, Consomme Sarah Bernhardt. America! But years later, it was something else that remained indelible. A feeling shared, grave and simple, that survived all the acclaim.

'It's a book about blokes, bluff outside, but discerning inside, blokes who speak poetry, the way we all would speak if we could put our finest feelings into words...It's a beautiful book: complete, strong and poetic.' Bulletin

Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt in New Zealand and graduated from Victoria University. He has worked as a journalist and covered Papua New Guinea's blockade of Bougainville during the 1990s, which formed the setting for his bestselling Mister Pip. Jones has received awards including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial fellowship (1988), the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize (2003) and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (2001). In 2007, Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Mister Pip, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2008 he received the New Zealand Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. His latest book is Hand Me Down World.