Various authors: Epitaph II

Foreword by Paul Gittens

Random House

$34.95

Most people are familiar with the proposition that fired the successful television series Epitaph: that fascinating stories lie buried in our country's graveyards.

Paul Gittens and researchers have scoured cemeteries, finding intriguing epitaphs and ferreting out the stories behind them.

As Gittens writes, the stories convey something of our social history, of the great melting pot of 19th and early-20th-century New Zealand.

These stories are from the second and third series of the TV programme: the tragic tale of would-be writer Ingeborg Stuckenberg; highwayman Frederick Eggers; Pakeha Caroline Perrett who was brought up by Maori; Amy Bock, who passed herself off as a man and who now lies in an unmarked grave in the Pukekohe cemetery; and 17 other well-told tales.