Butterfly Creek Books, 2007.
This is the story of a man who made a coal mine. If some people thought, or hoped, that the coal mine would unmake the man they were wrong. He was indestructible. The man was Joseph Taylor, an immigrant from Staffordshire. The mine was the Puponga Coal Mine in a remote corner of remote New Zealand.

Joseph began work as a miner at the age of ten. By twenty-one he was studying in Manchester. Already well read in many fields, his special interests were geology and mining engineering on the one hand and theology on the other.

He became an expert geologist, practical, logical and observant. In religion he was a different man. He could be charismatic, over and over again winning a flock of admirers. Then some demon within him would force Joseph to turn those same people against him as though he half hoped for religious martyrdom. As a mining engineer he came within sight of achieving a practical success of a kind that he and many another man would find completely fulfilling. The outcome was a martyrdom he could never have wanted.