More than 1,000 copies of a new New Zealand book have been packed and shipped by hand in a DIY distribution effort that mirrors the community spirit at the heart of its subject matter.

When boxes of Heart of the Protest arrived in New Zealand, they didn’t go to a warehouse or a publishing house, they went to a garage in Aylesbury.

There, co-author and filmmaker Gaylene Barnes, best known for directing the 2023 documentary River of Freedom, worked alongside co-author Siân Clement and her mother to package and dispatch the entire first wave of orders before the Easter long weekend.

It’s a fitting launch for a book that champions the power of ordinary people.

Heart of the Protest expands on the River of Freedom documentary, weaving together the personal accounts of thousands of New Zealanders who gathered at Parliament in 2022 to oppose COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Alongside those testimonies, the 424-page book examines political decisions and media responses, and highlights perspectives the authors say were largely absent from mainstream coverage,  and only briefly acknowledged in the recently released Royal Commission Phase 2 report.

The self-distribution model is a deliberate one.

The same grassroots approach helped River of Freedom reach number one at the New Zealand box office in 2023, and early signs suggest the book is following a similar trajectory.

Without traditional retail backing, it is already shipping at a pace that would place it among the country’s top-selling titles if sold through conventional channels.
Early reviews have been strong.

Media commentator Maree Buscke praised the book for restoring “humanity to the hundreds of thousands who felt systematically dehumanised,” while former psychiatrist Emanuel Garcia, reviewing it for NewZealandDoc, said he read the entire book in a single day, calling the personal testimonies “quite invaluable” for history and posterity.

Locals will have the chance to meet the authors in person at a free public book signing and reading at Te Ara Ātea, Rolleston Library, on Wednesday 22 April from 4.00pm to 6.00pm.