Kavan sought novel characteristics among the citizens in this ‘new country, a country so full of splendour and strangeness’. She didn’t like what she found. In the same decade she discovered ‘something lacking’, the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow held similar notions. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he wrote in 1945, ‘New Zealand doesn’t exist yet, though some possible New Zealands glimmer in some poems and on some canvases. It remains to be created – should I say invented – by writers, musicians, artists, architects, publishers; even a politician might help – and how many generations does that take?’

There are the facts of a nation. We cite dates, the ‘founding’ by whites, other epochs that came long before the first waves of pale skin; wars; industrial and scientific progress. Such feats, easy to recite, form a country’s skeleton. There is, however, something much more difficult to define – the kind of history that reveals itself through the achievements of a nation’s arts. Triumphs in the fields of art, music, and literature form nothing less than an emotional history, a kind of story-truth that cloaks itself around the skeleton of fact.

‘We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it,’ Lawrence Durrell writes in Justine (1957). It is no surprise, then, to discover that writers work within the fate of their own geographies. The inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire, said he believes that while the West looms in the American imagination, the Outback resides, always, at the back of the Australian psyche. On these same lines, he cites his country’s proximity to Antarctica – that ‘alien terror and loveliness’ – along with its geographical remoteness as occupying a permanent realm in the New Zealand consciousness.

Another aspect of that consciousness: New Zealand writers work inside the borders of a small nation. It is, to borrow from a Lloyd Jones title, a land ‘at the end of the world’, a country .64 the size of California, with a population of less than four and a half million people. ‘But what is a small nation?’ Milan Kundera asks in ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (New York Review of Books, 1984). ‘I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it.’ This latter sentiment may explain the vibrancy of New Zealand literature and the urgency of its readers. At once aware of the high quality of the country’s writers, these readers also understand that they are the first and, at times, final audience for the work of their countrymen and women. A disproportionate number of them work at world-class levels.

Penguin has released a uniform hardcover series of six novels, each published between 1986 and 2000, which fit that latter category. Each received the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The authors, household names among New Zealand readers, grant us a privileged glimpse into the land, history, and temperaments of the country. The subjects range from the Maori oral tradition (Potiki by Patricia Grace, $29.99 hb, 226 pp, 9780143573784) to family saga (The Singing Whakapapa by C.K. Stead, $29.99 hb, 344 pp, 9780143573777) and the creation of national myth through the adoration of rugby (The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones, $29.99 hb, 203 pp, 9780143573791).

Several arresting aspects weave through these six novels. We witness a remarkably divergent range of styles and voices from these writers, who cause us to readjust our understanding of the possibilities of the form. Along with this aspect comes another common thread, namely a sustained examination of landscape, language, history, culture, and identity. In Stead’s complex and engrossing The Singing Whakapapa, Hugh Grady devotes his energies to understanding his life and times by researching ‘all the lives who came before, shading back in time and across seas’. Grady moves from ‘real history, which was, so to speak, in the public domain, in favour of his family story, his “singing whakapapa”’.

Another story of whakapapa – the Maori term for genealogy – that sings in originality, Patricia Grace’s Potiki unfolds through the voice of the child-prophet Tokowaru-i-te-Marama. Grace, along with the novelist Witi Ihimaera and poet Hone Tuwhare, is one of the leading voices of Maori literature. Interviewed for this article, award-winning New Zealand novelist Paula Morris calls Potiki ‘a landmark in Maori literature, not just because Grace refused to include a glossary, demanding that the NZ reader embrace te reo Maori in order to enter the world of the novel. It is both lyrical and political, and explores myth alongside social issues about land and dispossession.’ With its poetic intensity, Potiki reveals the ways in which the past infiltrates the present. It reads like a tale that has been handed down through the generations, waiting to be consigned to paper.

Many New Zealanders grow up reading the young adult novels of Maurice Gee, whose eerie The Burning Boy ($29.99 hb, 354 pp, 9780143573760), set in provincial New Zealand, is one of many in this series that deserves an international audience. Like much of the work of Ian McEwan, The Burning Boy revolves around the repercussions of a single violent event. As Morris suggests, ‘If Gee had been born British, he would have won the Man Booker Prize by now.’ Another novel set in provincial New Zealand, The Skinny Louie Book by Fiona Farrell ($29.99 hb, 323 pp, 9780143573753), gives us some of the most memorable characters we encounter in this series. It begins when Skinny Louie – fifteen and pregnant, paternity doubtful – gives birth in the public gardens of a small town on the night before the queen’s visit in 1953. Farrell’s début adds a Kiwi sensibility to magic realism.

Among these writers, Lloyd Jones – whose Mister Pip (2006) earned a place on the Booker Prize short list – has experienced the most international success. His earlier novel, The Book of Fame, segues between prose and verse as it imagines the 1905 All Blacks, the first of such squads to sail for the other side of the world, where its athletes come to dominate opponents. Jones writes in a collective voice, a first-person plural that seeks to understand the identity and meaning of a country that, seventy years after Curnow’s comment, continues to fashion itself through history and myth, fact, and invention.

We see this in Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Phar Lap’. Manhire writes of ‘this chestnut colt, / foaled in Timaru’ whose ‘hide is in Melbourne, / the heart in Canberra. / The bones are in Wellington’ and who died, he writes, ‘of absence’ – absence from the land itself, a country whose size and population may cause many to overlook it while its writers continue to produce work as though no other centre could exist. These novels, all published within a fourteen-year span, reveal a fraction of the richness and breadth of what the country’s writers have given us. They remind us of all that cannot be accounted for in statistics, those truths that we seek in fiction and what the best of it provides.