Adam's Tale

Adam is the only child of a New Zealand diplomat, a boy who grows up travelling between a beloved New Zealand lakeside bach and postings in foreign cities where he never quite fits. He learns early how to observe, how to adapt, and how to carry the specific loneliness of always being the new one.

But Adam's real education happens in the spaces between school terms and diplomatic functions. It happens when he and his Maori friend Patariki hatch a daring plan to rescue a wild black stallion from a government cull. It happens when a gaunt, terrified Rottweiler crawls toward a picnic fire on a rocky Wellington beach and refuses to leave two hearts unchanged. And it happens in a soundproofed music room where a girl named Melody shakes his hand and changes everything he thought he knew about his future.

Adam's Tale follows its hero from adventurous childhood through a turbulent adolescence in Brussels and back to the wild beauty of Aotearoa New Zealand, where he must finally decide what kind of life he is brave enough to choose. Along the way he stands up to bullies, earns and risks a scholarship, discovers music as his truest language, loves and loses in ways that do not resolve neatly, and learns that the people who shape us most are not always the ones who stay. Adam's Tale is a coming-of-age story that reminds us why the choices we make when we are young echo through everything we eventually become.