Dan Davin a Rhodes scholar, and for many years and one of New Zealand's acknowledged masters of the short story was born in Invercargill, New Zealand in 1914. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in early twentieth-century Southland. Comic, haunting, compelling, poetic, lyrical, and entertaining, these stories have a regional flavor quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of an idiosyncratic rural community its post-British social relationships and tribulations with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton, or Marshall. The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.