P.D.R. Lindsay – författare

He came back with everything he promised. It was already too late.When I Come Again is a prize-winning historical fiction short story by New Zealand writer p.d.r. Lindsay, set in Bronze Age northern Europe among peat lakes, marsh villages, and the ancient rites of the goddess Nerthus. Becan left his village as a young man with nothing to offer but a promise and four years to make good on it. Laila's father laughed at him. The village expected him to fail. Instead he traded his way along the great rivers, learned from Roman merchants, gathered ponies and silver and small careful wealth, and sent Laila a new feather every year to count down the seasons until his return. Now the geese are flying south and Becan is almost home, singing a soldier's love song under his breath, planning the house he will build and the life they will share. What he finds when he crosses the causeway will take everything from him. And what he does next will define the man he has become. Perfect for readers who love:- Literary historical fiction and ancient world short stories - Bronze Age and Iron Age historical settings - Stories set in pre-Roman northern Europe and Scandinavia - Short reads with emotional depth and strong characters - Historical fiction featuring ancient religion, ritual, and daily life Rich with period detail, told in a voice as clean and unhurried as the landscape it describes, When I Come Again is a story about the cruelty of communities, the stubbornness of love, and the small, brave acts that make an ordinary life worth living. It is historical fiction at its finest, spare, honest, and deeply felt. A prize-winning short story from one of New Zealand's most accomplished independent writersPublished by Writer's Choice, a writers' publishing collective dedicated to quality fiction.

A haunted starship. A reluctant spiritual healer. A Christmas Eve unlike any other. 'Christmas Spirits' is a quietly powerful science fiction short story by award-recognised New Zealand writer p.d.r. Lindsay, blending Maori cultural tradition with deep-space adventure in a tale that will stay with you long after the final page. The family motto has always been simple: there are no ghosts in space. For generations, the family's tohunga, their Maori spiritual leaders, have built a thriving business solving the problems that technology and science cannot explain. The current tohunga, the ninth in the line, has cultivated a comfortable life firmly rooted in the New Zealand landscape he loves. Space jobs are for his children. Until now. A quarantined deep-space military starship is experiencing communication failures, unexplained static, and persistent disturbances that have defeated every specialist sent aboard. With Christmas Eve counting down and the whole family waiting back on the Northland beach, he boards the isolation bay and begins to investigate. What he discovers changes everything he thought he knew about what it means to be lost, and what it takes to truly come home. Perfect for readers who love: - Thoughtful, character-driven science fiction short stories - Science fiction featuring indigenous culture and mythology - Festive SF and Christmas ghost stories with emotional depth - New Zealand fiction and Pacific voices in speculative fiction - Short reads ideal for the holiday season Rich with cultural authenticity, gentle humour, and genuine heart, 'Christmas Spirits' proves that the most ancient human needs, love, belonging, and the longing for home, travel just as far as any starship ever could. A warm, wise, and wonderfully original science fiction story for the Christmas season and beyond.Published by Writer's Choice, a writers' publishing collective dedicated to quality fiction.

This is the night. Hiroko has prepared everything with loving precision: Wearing her finest silk kimono in lavender and lilac, her hair pinned up with gold and coral combs, the seating cushions placed just so beside the lotus pool, and her news, her special news, held close in her heart for revealing at the perfect moment when the lotus open. She is seventeen years old, she has a house, a husband, and a child on the way, and tonight the white lotus will open for the first time. Captain Martin Langley, her splendid English husband, is due at any moment. Everything is perfect, everything is ready. The Captain arrives, but in full dress uniform, with deeds for the house and a purse he considers generous enough to pay his way out. He has his trunks packed, his passage booked, and an English fiancée waiting. Hiroko must understand she was only his Japanese wife. For Captain Langley, their arrangement was always a comfortable tour-of-duty convenience. For Hiroko, it was a marriage, a future, and now a child. The collision of those two realities, played out in the moonlight against the scent of lotus blossoms and the sound of frogs, produces consequences the Captain never anticipated. Set with beautiful detail in a Meiji-era garden on a summer night, this elegantly told short story examines colonial entitlement, female resilience, and the moment a woman who has been told to kneel finally decides what her own life is worth. Readers who love atmospheric historical fiction with precise, unhurried prose and a twist that arrives as quietly as a lotus opening will not forget this one.

Set in a frost-sharpened New Zealand valley, "e;Man of Principle"e; is a short story precise enough to cut. It moves from wry domestic comedy to something rawer and more honest, a portrait of a good man who has lived by his convictions long enough to mistake them for wisdom.On the family farm, divided by a family land trust, a retired farmer called Angus discovers that his lifelong principles, about firewood, about land, about what a man decides on his own property, carry less weight than six family votes. Angus Grant is seventy-eight, retired but not finished, proud but not cruel. Every morning he rises before dawn to light the fire for Nessa, his arthritic wife, and every day he fights a quiet battle to remain master of the land he has farmed his whole life. What begins as a dispute over an oak tree becomes a confrontation with ageing, irrelevance, and the limits of pride. Precise, bittersweet, and quietly funny, this award-winning short story asks how much of ourselves we can give away before we lose what matters most.Winner of a short story contest in an English literary journal, Man of Principle is the kind of story that lingers: quietly funny, quietly devastating, and full of the complicated, inarguable love that holds difficult families together.

In this memoir, a deeply personal and carefully documented account, author p.d.r. lindsay reflects on the ways in which her beloved Anglican church is coming up short. The hold of the past over the present in the Anglican faith causes many problems, as does the sense of entitlement many of the clergy own. Finding her courage after discovering the deception and cover-ups in her own diocese she then sought out justice, for both herself and for all the parishioners of her local church. Her narrative and brave fight for justice ended with a shocking struggle to refute accusations of mental instability and violence and remove the Diocese banning and trespassing from her church.

One small coin. One big victory. A slice of British childhood so vivid you'll almost smell the aniseed balls.Bully-boy Mike had already taken her threepence, twisting her arm until she dropped it, then spent every penny on himself while she went out in the cold to do the shopping he was supposed to do. He thought that was the end of it. He was wrong. Crouching to rescue a dropped glove from the slushy snow, she sees it: a whole silver sixpence, shining up at her like a secret meant only for her. Now she has enough for two quarter-pound bags of sweets, a plan that involves Floral Gums and a detour to Gran's house, and the exquisite pleasure of knowing that the one person who should have gone to the shop is going to get absolutely nothing. "e;I've Got Sixpence"e; is a brief, bright, perfectly tuned story about childhood, sibling rivalry, and the very specific genius of getting even without ever raising your voice. Readers who grew up in an England of sweet jars and sherbet dust will feel it in their bones. Readers who did not will wish they had. ---

"e;Outjockeyed"e; is a small, perfectly formed story about the things we do in the name of protection, and the damage they leave behind. It asks, with warmth and without judgement, whether love that refuses to bend has any right to call itself love at all.Gaffer has tended his chapel's garden for decades, carrying on the tradition of his father and grandfather before him. He is a man of deep roots, firm convictions, and a temper that has been known to clear a room. When his seven-year-old grandson Phil wins a beginning rider award at pony club, a prize that required lying to his grandfather about who owned the pony, Gaffer delivers his verdict swiftly and without appeal: Phil will not see him again until the riding stops, and his daughter-in-law Susie will do without his help on the farm until it does. His minister arrives in the church garden one afternoon with a tray of warm, buttery date scones and no illusions about how difficult this conversation will be. Through the careful, unhurried exchange that follows, a deeper story emerges. Phil's father, Jack, died in a steeplechase. Gaffer's silence then, as now, came too late to protect anyone, and the grief he has never named has curdled into a fury he cannot distinguish from love. The minister knows that Gaffer's family has repeated this same pattern of stubbornness and estrangement across three generations, and that today, in this garden, is the moment to break it. Quietly devastating and ultimately hopeful, this is one old man, one wise minister, one impossible afternoon.

Ula was the one they barely forgave. She became the one who saved them. *Seed Time Harvest Time* is a taut, atmospheric story of one sharp-eyed young woman whose instincts are the only thing standing between her people and catastrophe.In an Iron Age village on the edge of famine, the Spring Festival of the earth goddess Nerthus is not a celebration. It is a desperate prayer. Two previous harvests have been destroyed. Winter taught the village what hunger feels like. Now everything depends on the goddess's blessing, on sacred fires lit correctly, on seeds counted and praised and returned to the sacred lake, on the community's faith holding firm through one more season. Ula knows how fragile faith can be. A forbidden love affair with a promised man left her disgraced, struck by her father's hand, and handed over to serve Priest Caradoc and the goddess, Nerthus. She counts herself fortunate. She is still here. Still useful. Slowly, carefully, she is earning her way back. The village is beginning to accept her again. The goddess seems pleased with her service. Then the traders arrive. Dark-eyed and beardless and nothing like the blond men of the village, they bring silver bowls and polished manners and gifts for the goddess. The priests are satisfied. The community feasts. But Ula watches the strangers' eyes moving over the women's gold ear drops, the priests' fine drinking cups, the arm rings and finger rings, always counting, always weighing. She has learned, through hard experience, to trust what she sees rather than what she is told. Late at night when the moon is at its fullest and the frost has silvered the sleeping village, Ula wakes and discovers the truth about the traders. Then she acts to try and save the village and her people.Seed Time, Harvest Time is a gripping, richly atmospheric work of historical fiction rooted in the ancient world of Iron Age Northern Europe. Drawing on the historical traditions of the goddess Nerthus, bog ritual and sacrifice, Iron Age community life, and the social world of tribal Germanic and Celtic peoples, this story brings the ancient past to vivid, immediate life through the eyes of one unforgettable young woman.