One Minute Crying Time

The dazzling memoir of one of New Zealand’s best-known actors

In 1962, the young New Zealand actress Barbara Ewing left for London, to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She went on to have a distinguished career in the theatre and in television and film, and to write celebrated novels.

This vivid memoir covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s. Evocative, candid and brave, this entrancing book takes us back to a long-ago New Zealand with its often difficult relations between Māori and Pākehā. And it explores, with the help of old, fading diaries, the enduring but mysterious interweavings of love, memory and truth.

To look inside, click here.

‘This memoir is aching and authentic.’ — Jenny Nicholls 

‘Ewing is an intelligent and analytical observer of her own life, and an honest one.’ — Linda Burgess, The Spinoff