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.


Peter Dornauf was born in Hamilton in 1947 and was brought up on a farm a little north of there in the early 1950s and ‘60s. He graduated from Waikato University with an arts degree and after teacher training, taught secondary school for a number of years before travelling overseas. Based in England, he taught for a year and then returned to New Zealand, where he worked with severely handicapped children and later at a public art gallery. It was during this period that he began writing and painting, winning the Gallagher Art Award, judged by Hamish Keith, in the early ‘90s.

Peter Dornauf now lives in Hamilton where he teaches and lectures part-time in the subject of art history.