Virginia Ngatea Seton leaves New Orleans, where she works as a researcher for an historical novelist, and returns home to Auckland for the wedding of her younger sister. Drawn back into the world of her Pakeha-Maori family, Virginia rediscovers many family stories and legends. She learns how the city of her youth has inextricably changed, as surely as the country of her grandparents is gone for ever. At turns haunting, moving and comic, Queen of Beauty spans three generations. Shifting between modern-day New Orleans and Auckland, as well as New Zealand of the 1920s and 1960s, it explores the fragility of truth, the elusiveness of the past and the burden it places on the living. Queen of Beauty was the winner of the Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction Award at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the 2001 Adam Foundation Prize for Creative Writing.