Arrowtown book-buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read and life as she sees it.
Quickly, quickly! Go to Paper Plus and you might still get a ticket for a fabulous event.
Unless you live under a rock like my editor (ooh, I love saying that), you will know that Paullina Simons has written a number of best-selling novels.
Among them, and one of my all time favourites (I know I'm not alone in loving it, given how often it gets recommended to me), is The Bronze Horseman - a full-on heaving and writhing, heavy-breathing, desperately romantic and tragic novel set in World War 2 Russia.
Ms Simons is a genius and she lands in Queenstown in early November.
I may have misled some of you by telling you she was speaking in Queenstown, but in fact it's even better than that - she is going to be speaking in Jan Pinckney's Northburn Station winery/cheesery, fabulous foodery shed with a capital S.
So November 5 at 6pm is going to be way better than anything Guy Fawkes ever did.
I have been lucky enough to have been given the job of interviewing her, and my extensive research so far shows that she is a very glamorous redhead.
It does seem a little unfair that she looks like that AND writes best sellers.
I bet even her passport photo is great.
My new passport just arrived in the mail.
When you get a new one, I advise you to throw the old one straight in the bin.
Do not compare it with the new one! Apart from the usual problem with passport photos, which is looking as if you probably shouldn't be travelling without a minder, the one you had taken 10 years ago and which you thought made you look hideously old at the time now makes you look a positive babe compared with the new version.
It will have to be hidden from my darling.
He doesn't like being left at home alone.
I have told him that normal husbands shriek and yell with delight at the thought of a wife-less week, free to leave the loo seat up and drink milk out of the bottle and watch sport on telly even if it is sunny outside.
I must be too nice to him - a problem so easily fixed . . .
I didn't do much reading while I hiked along Victoria's Great Ocean Road, but I have just read and loved Anita Diamant's Day after Night.
She is the author of The Red Tent and I haven't been crazy about most of her other novels.
This latest one is based on the true story of a group of Holocaust survivors who were put in a prison for illegal immigrants in Israel and subsequently rescued.
The friendship and tensions between the four main characters are described in the same dazzling form Diamant used in The Red Tent.
Annabel Langbein's newest cookbook, Anyone Can Cook, is currently undergoing a very harsh and challenging review process in Dunedin.
With such a "dare you to" title, we delivered a recipe and the necessary ingredients to three student flats, each containing one of our darling boys.
While you might think anyone can cook, it is certainly a lot easier if you don't have to spend two hours cleaning the mountains of dirty dishes first, and a fortune buying every single ingredient, including the salt and pepper.
It was shaming to discover that one of our sons has only a deepfat fryer to cook in at this late stage of the year - he says they even deepfry their toast.
The cooking experiment hasn't been an unqualified success.
I didn't realise that not only were the correct ingredients required, but also the correct quantities.
Cooking the whole packet of chinese noodles in a small saucepan was never going to make a happy meal.
Round two of the trial will be conducted this week, but apart from a few hiccups, things are looking promising.
Have a wonderful Labour Weekend.
The jazz festival line-up is amazing and don't forget the fantastic plant sale at Otago Polytech's Cromwell campus.
Jo Wakelin's horticulture students spend the whole year growing and grafting all sorts of goodies and flog the lot on Saturday - well worth the trip.
