'The Land Near Oz: Two Gay Yankees Move to New Zealand'

Aaron Allbright examines the mystical fringes of life with a side of love and a little hash.  Filled with great affection, indescribable moments of serendipity, and a few cattle calls, this memoir is a raucous spot of fun that just goes to prove that paradise has a lot of sheep and the natives spend just as much time getting caught up in a whodunit murder-mystery as they do raising money for the local primary school.

In one particular story from the book, the couple is searching for a place marked Paradise on their map and are surprised to come across a road sign that says, “PARADISE: NO EXIT.”

In lively chapters with titles like 'Northern Exposure New Zealand Style,' 'The Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant, they're All Blokes,' and 'Te Ika-A-Maui,' Allbright describes the edge of a life that’s rare. It’s what you see when you follow your dreams and all you ever hoped for explodes into what was meant to be—just not at all what was expected.

And there are intimations of mortality when Aaron is diagnosed with leukemia. More than somewhat.

When Aaron Allbright and his better half, Beau, buy a piece of paradise from the direct descendants of the first English missionaries to inhabit the far side of the Far North of New Zealand, they’ll meet the offspring of whores, convicts, whalers, English pirates and those first missionaries. Their closest seaside neighbor is Australia at 2,000 miles away—known to everyone thereabouts as OZ. From Orange County, California, to the land of and flightless birds, two Gay men—a college professor and an IBM exec who decide to chuck it all and light our for the Territory—find what’s over the rainbow.

For one thing there are Māoris with traditional full face and body tattoos. There’s a former member of Led Zeppelin and a fan from Texas named Big Mama. And in the wild hinterland paradise of evermore, dreams are made and life is mostly good—just not in the way either Aaron or Beau hoped, planned, or could have ever imagined.