Top five favourite NZ novels named

The votes have been tallied from a recent poll on nzherald.co.nz to find readers' favourite novel by a New Zealand author.

Five books that just missed out on the top five were; The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame, The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox, Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones and Plumb by Maurice Gee. Here is the top five.

When Smith is left by his wife and goes to hide away in the bush in the Coromandel, he never imagines he will become the most wanted man in the country. In a right-wing coup one man, Volkner, has seized power in New Zealand and is using army and special police to maintain his government. Written in 1971 by author C.K. Stead, Smith's Dream was turned into the 1977 film Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill.

Barry Crump's first, and most-loved novel, A Good Keen Man was first published in 1960 and quickly became immensely popular.

Born in Papatoetoe in 1935, Crump worked for many years as a government deer-culler in areas of New Zealand native forest and

A Good Keen Man

was the result of his collected experiences.

One night Kerewin Holmes' solitude is disrupted by a visitor - a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with a mixture of tenderness and brutality. The Bone People, published in 1984, went on to win the Booker Prize.

The same night as a girl is slain in the woods, young teenagers Sam and Les are robbed of all of their hard earned hens. In the quest for their hens they cross the murderer's path. Largely ignored upon its first publication in 1963, The Scarecrow combines adventure, psychological thriller, small-town saga and family farce to produce a hallucinatory mixture distinctively Morrieson's own.

Set in 1868, Lieutenant George Fairweather, late of her Majesty's British Imperial Army, resigns his commission and journeys to Poverty Bay, seeking new landscapes to paint and hoping to resume his relationship with a half-caste Maori woman. He is then enlisted in the defense of the colonists against the rebel Te Kooti and his followers, who liken themselves to the Israelites cast out of Egypt, led by a new Moses. Season of the Jew, first published in 1987, is the first of three books which became known as the Maori Wars trilogy.