Shirley Simmonds on Tane’s War by Brendaniel Weir

Emma Gattey on Fishing for Māui by Isa Pearl Ritchie

Ruth Brown on The Life of De’Ath by Majella Cullinane

Michael Morrissey Words and Water by John Parkyn (Atzimba Press, 2017), 220 pp., $30 Many decades ago John Parkyn and I worked in the proofreading room of the Herald. We were aspirant writers. At my count, there were at least four (maybe five) hopeful writers in total. Proofreading rooms were like that in the 70s […]

Holly Walker All Our Secrets by Jennifer Lane (Rosa Mira Books, 2018), 276 pp., $30 Ostensibly, All Our Secrets is a book about a series of murders, and about a religious commune that moves in to live uncomfortably alongside a conservative rural New South Wales town, Coongahoola, in the 1980s. There’s a mystery to be […]

Majella Cullinane Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine, 2018), 280 pp., $35 A passion for music, and its ability to connect the most dissimilar of women, Eva McAlester and Grace Coles, lies at the heart of the novel Gone to Pegasus. Divided into four parts that correspond to musical tempos, the story is set […]

Harley Hern The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 362 pp., $30 Seventeen years after her highly praised debut novel Breakwater, Kate Duignan’s second novel, The New Ships, explores very different territory. Peter Collie is a model of reliability and responsibility, a Wellington lawyer in his late forties, financially stable, cautious and […]