Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb
Kind by Stephanie Johnson (RHNZ Vintage, 2023), 336pp, $37
At the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021, Stephanie Johnson predicted that there were going to be many works examining the coronavirus and the unusual world of 2020. Kind is her contribution to this diverse and interesting field. It’s a novel that sits somewhere between domestic noir, thriller and satire—a bit like those lockdown days in 2020. [Read more…]
Gill South
Golden Days by Caroline Barron (Affirm Press, 2023), 288pp, $38
The novel Golden Days by Caroline Barron, which combines a coming-of-age story with the tale of a woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis, is a very assured debut. Barron, whose memoir Ripiro Beach won the 2020 New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book, is a writer interested in memory, and remembering and misremembering. Golden Days explores this central preoccupation through a number of conceits and tropes: the intoxication of a new creative friendship; the damaging effect of the male gaze in mid-1990s culture; how we rewrite history to live with ourselves; and the importance of facing the truth after trauma. [Read more…]
Denys Trussell
Love & Money: The writer’s cut by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2023), 252pp, $37.99
This novel is serious in its social and political insights, but it lays them out with a comic and satiric vision. Now in its third incarnation, the work was born as a screenplay and became a novel in 2012. It is here published as a rewrite, with the author-as-editor acting as ‘the brute wielding the scalpel’ to make a text that, in this case, is shorter than the original. This is ‘The Writer’s Cut’. [Read more…]
Max Oettli
A Message for Nasty by Roderick Fry (Awa Press, 2022), 282pp, $40
World War II created some 20 million displaced people in Europe; Asian figures are harder to find. One Chinese historian mentions a million Chinese leaving Hong Kong out of a population of about 2.5 million after the Japanese conquest of 1941. There are no readily available statistics for the Europeans living in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese army’s invasion, nor many details about what happened to them. [Read more…]
Rachel Smith
A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha: An anthology of new writing for a changed world edited by Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy (Massey University Press, 2023), 359pp, $39.99
Skip back three years or so to when the world was beginning to understand what the COVID-19 pandemic would be. It’s here that writers and editors Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy began to consider the project that would become A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha. This book is not a pandemic anthology. It encompasses much more, taking the reader to places before, after and through this time, and many voices from Aotearoa and abroad tell stories of who we were and are, and of the challenges that have long been with us—decolonisation, indigeneity, climate change. [Read more…]
Loveday Why
The Artist by Ruby Solly (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 144pp, $30; Foxstruck and Other Collisions by Shari Kocher (Puncher & Wattman, 2020), 144pp, AUS$30; Iris and Me by Philippa Werry (The Cuba Press, 2023), 175pp, $25
Te Korekore is the void, the space of emptiness and potential, the portal of creation. These three poetry books—two verse novels, one intricately structured collection—swerve away from and toward the void, emerging from it and dissolving into it in iterative remakings of the self through story. As they grapple with themes of identity, family, disability, artistry and the ecospiritual connection to land and water, poetry itself is shown as crucial to the generations-long work of weaving and reweaving personal identity and attempting a collective sense of home. [Read more…]