Kay McKenzie Cooke

Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 342pp, $38

In her novel Pet Catherine Chidgey introduces readers to a world where a sense of distress lurks and tugs, and where seeds of suspense planted in the opening pages continue to grow. There is a fascination in the way the storyline is spun that draws you in and keeps you enthralled, even as the ground shifts, threatening to undermine progress towards a denouement. Pet has all the hallmarks of a slow reveal as the narrator, Justine Crieve, looks back in order to forecast a way ahead. The truth will need to be extracted from the weight of a mass of confusion and doubt that has burdened her from the age of twelve: ‘Though I’ve had thirty years to think about it, thirty years to go over every detail. The great dark hulk of it always adrift in me.’ [Read more…]

Craig Cliff

Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 208pp, $35

Alba, Drew and Stanley are three giants on the spacecraft Audition hurtling we know not where at the start of Pip Adam’s newest—and strangest—novel.

In her acknowledgements section, Adam writes: ‘This book is about the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system. In my personal life I am committed to this end and believe an urgent and imperative part of this work is Land Back in the hands of rightful owners.’ For those readers, like me, who read the acknowledgements first, or to anyone who has heard, seen or read an interview with Adam to accompany the release of Audition, such statements build the expectation that this will be a polemical book. [Read more…]

Elizabeth Heritage

The Words for Her by Thomasin Sleigh (Lawrence & Gibson, 2023), 288pp, $30

The Words for Her, Thomasin Sleigh’s third pakimaero or novel, takes the current moral panic about smartphones and turns it into a Covidesque real global crisis.

The premise is that people all around the world have started ‘going out’—disappearing from photos and video, and becoming unfilmable. Society starts to collapse as the ‘gaps’ (people who have gone out) become more and more numerous. The ‘presents’ (people who have not gone out) start photographing everyone around them compulsively. Cult leaders emerge and governments crack down. [Read more…]

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…]