Day of Grass

- Blurb -

Eason Vercoe is an idealistic and impressionable eighteen-year-old, a farm boy who becomes an undergraduate at a local university. Having bought himself a motorbike he sets off to find knowledge, but shy and unworldly, Eason only finds isolation and loneliness. Deciding to leave at the end of the fourth week, he is suddenly excited by the words of Plato and decides to stay. A coming-of-age story, Day of Grass confronts the issues of life and death in a secular age where all the traditional and metaphysical support systems have been demolished, while at the same time singing a hymn to the pastoral beauty of tree-lined paddocks, hedges, haystacks, sheds, cattle and the cricket-humming grass. Set in the sixties, it plays off against a background of political, social and intellectual change in a New Zealand setting where town and country also compete for the soul of the embattled young man. Day of Grass is that rare commodity - a book that is both a novel of ideas and a narrative of emotion, written with an eye for poetic nuance and involving characters that jump off the page. Think Milan Kundera mixed and shaken lightly with F. Scott Fitzgerald.