A year in Rarotonga changes American woman's life

AWA PRESS MEDIA RELEASE: JULY 29, 2010

A year in Rarotonga changes American woman's life

When American Kathy Giuffre decides to take her two small sons and flee to Rarotonga for a year to escape a broken marriage, a second failed relationship, and a high-stress life as a working single mother, she is taking the biggest gamble of her life.

She knows no one on the island - in fact she hardly knows where it is. She is leaving a comfortable, if sometimes fraught, position as a university lecturer at Colorado College.

She attempts to arrange a house on the island in advance, but when she arrives the house, and the person arranging it, seem to have vanished into thin air.Â

And she has her two boys, aged three and seven, to look after. Things do not look promising.

In her captivating story An Afternoon in Summer (Awa Press, September 1), Giuffre describes how what started out as a disaster turns into a completely life-changing experience. In the course of a year in which Giuffre lives in a large old white house on the edge of the ocean with an 82-year-old Māori woman and various sundry boarders, she and her sons become gradually immersed in island life, from umu to ancestral ghosts, and rediscover age-old values of friendship and belonging.

But this is also an affecting love story. As she restores her life, Giuffre contacts an old student love, and finds to her surprise that he too is again single...

Author Kapka Kassabova, author of the much praised autobiography Street Without a Name, says: 'Kathy's Giuffre's hilarious observations had me laughing out loud. She writes with disarming honesty, but this is also a love letter to the people of Rarotonga, rich with the joys and sorrows of a lost paradise.'

An Afternoon in Summer will be released in New Zealand on September 1. RRP $30.

Awa Press books may be purchased in all good bookstores in New Zealand and Australia, and online at www.awapress.com .