[9] It was published in the same year as debut collections by Lauris Edmond and Elizabeth Smither, and according to The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, marked "an important development in women's writing in New Zealand".

[5] Her first two novels, The Limits of Green (1985)[11] and Running Away from Home (1987),[12] were both set in the future, with environmentalist themes, and received polarising reviews from critics.

It received some criticism for its portrayal of the women, with Sheppard's biographer and great-great-niece Tessa K. Malcolm calling it "slander in fiction".

[16] Her fourth novel, Humming (2005),[17] was set in Golden Bay, and described by The Press as "a quirky read, with plenty of sly humour but with an underlying seriousness about matters spiritual and a person's discovery of a connection with the world around them".

[20] She has continued working in web writing education, launching a company in 2007 that offered online web-writing packages to individuals and businesses.

[23][24][25] In recent years, McAlpine has written blogs and performed podcasts about aging, and in 2020 she published a collection of her poems called How to Be Old in celebration of her 80th birthday.