Hannah Mettner

Attraction by Ruby Porter (Text Publishing, 2019), 288 pp., $37

When I saw Ruby Porter’s debut novel Attraction on the ‘recommended reads’ shelf at Unity, and browsed the blurb on the back, it appealed immediately. The idea of a plot based around three women who may be friends, lovers, or a bit of both, and are trying to figure that out, has the potential for the kind of sticky emotional writing that I’m always seeking out. But set and setting are everything; when I finally got around to the reading the book, the protests over the stolen land at Ihumātao had become a national news item, I’d flown home to Gisborne to say goodbye to my dying uncle, Jacinda had announced that New Zealand history would be taught in all New Zealand schools, and I was deep into a year-long te reo course. [Read more…]

Penelope Todd

The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate (Victoria University Press, 2019), 273 pp., $30

When I started uni, one early friendship group included a girl who, in memory, was a kind of Marilyn Monroe. Blonded, made-up, grown-up and, although new to the city, already in a relationship with an urbane and much older married man. In fact, we could never really be friends with her because the world into which she’d fallen was not even adjacent to our own naïve and wide-eyed take on Year One. It was another galaxy. [Read more…]

Paula Green

Loving Sylvie by Elizabeth Smither (Allen & Unwin, 2019), 328 pp., AU$32.99

‘She loved what others didn’t. Things aslant and odd, glimpsed from the corner of her eye.’ – Isobel in Loving Sylvie

Elizabeth Smither has published eighteen poetry collections, five novels and five short story collections along with memoirs and journals. In 2004 she received an honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of Auckland, and in 2008 was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievements in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Night Horse, won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her poems deliver an appealing mix of thought, feeling, economy and detail. I have found her fiction equally captivating: imbued with insight, layers, stillness and, conversely, intense movement. [Read more…]

Rebecca Styles

The Gulf Between by Maxine Alterio (Penguin, 2019) 299 pp., $38

Julia sits by her son’s hospital bed in Queenstown, sifting through memories and secrets as she tries to recall how her family fell apart in the Gulf of Naples. She had travelled there in the early 1960s with her husband Ben and their children Matteo (10) and Francesca (8). Julia’s husband grew up in Napoli and left after the war, but he’s been called back to look after his mother, Alessia, the matriarch of the family. [Read more…]

Francis Cooke

Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh (Lawrence & Gibson, 2018), 284 pp., $25

Midway through Women in the Field, One and Two, art writer and curator Ruth Bishops begins to assemble an exhibit based on the two titular paintings by her friend and frequent antagonist, Russian émigrée artist Irina Durova. Searching through the artist’s archive of paintings, she asks for work from 1912, the same year that the Women in the Field works were created, explaining to Irina that these will ‘give people a sense of how your work developed, what you were painting at the same time … explain Women in the Field’. ‘[T]hey don’t explain each other, they just happened,’ Irina retorts, ‘some at the same time, some later. Everything can’t be reduced to a straight line. Exhibitions like that are a lie.’ [Read more…]