Queen of beauty

Virginia Ngatea Seton leaves New Orleans, where she works as a researcher for an historical novelists, and returns home to Auckland for the wedding of her younger sister. Drawn back into the world of her Pakeha-Maori family, Virgina rediscovers many family stories and legends. She learns how the city of her youth has inextricably changed, as surely as the country of grandparents is gone forever. At turns haunting, moving and comic, Queen of Beauty spans three generations. Shifting between modern-day New Orleans and Auckland, as well as New Zealand of the 1920 and 1960s, it explores the fragility of truth, the elusiveness of the past and the burden it places on the living.