Sue Orr Aukati by Michalia Arathimos (Mākaro Press, 2017), 364 pp., $38 In 2013 Michalia Arathimos completed a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Her doctorate investigated the othering and exoticising of non-Pākehā writers in New Zealand media. An early draft of Aukati – Arathimos’ startling debut novel – […]
Nobody Ever Really Leaves
Louise Wallace Iceland by Dominic Hoey (Steele Roberts, 2017), 304 pp., $34.99 Iceland is the story of a doomed relationship – a train wreck we know will happen, and yet, of course, we can’t look away. This is the first novel from Dominic Hoey, also known as Tourettes, a musician, rapper and poet. The story’s […]
Popping with Electricity
Vaughan Rapatahana White City by David Lyndon Brown (Titus Books, 2017), 208 pp., $32 I well-remember David Brown from my high school days. He was one of the small number of tyro students at then recently opened Aorere College in Mangere, South Auckland, and two years ahead of me. We – the third formers – […]
Admirable Navigational Skills
Max Oettli Fletcher of the Bounty by Graeme Lay (HarperCollins, 2017), 304 pp., $36.99 Arr I like a good sea yarn. In my tender youth I took the bus on a weekly basis to the Hamilton Public Library (Young Adults Section) and took out a novel to read for the week. I coasted through Arthur […]
There Are Some Fellows … You Can’t Kill
Michael Morrissey Johnson by Dean Parker (Steele Roberts, 2017), 339 pp., $35 In 1995 Sam Neill presented a TV programme called the Cinema of Unease in which he referred to Man Alone, a famous novel by John Mulgan. ‘We hadn’t read it of course,’ said Neill cheerily. Speak for yourself, Sam! My edition – alas […]
A Plume of Glass Sparks
Iona Winter First Fox by Leanne Radojkovich (The Emma Press, 2017), 64 pp., £6.50; Waitapu by Helen Margaret Waaka (Escalator Press, 2015), 191 pp., $30 In her debut collection of flash fiction, First Fox, Auckland writer Leanne Radojkovich presents the reader with succinct yet layered vignettes – eleven tales crammed with profoundly intricate metaphors. Flash […]
Parting the Curtains
Charlotte Grimshaw The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press, 2017), $35 Three months into writing her novel, Catherine Chidgey gave a ‘chunk’ of it to her publisher to read: … and he didn’t say this is a big chaotic mess. He thinks it’s cutting-edge. I think if it is published it […]
A Troublesome Triangle
Linda Burgess Through the Lonesome Dark by Paddy Richardson (Upstart Press, 2017), 296 pp., $34.99 Given that my ‘if only’ location tends to be, say, Hampstead, living on the edge of the heath in a spacious book-filled house with loads of sash windows, I can’t say Paddy Richardson’s meticulously observed Blackball in the early decades […]
Psychic Damage
Thom Conroy Five Strings by Apirana Taylor (Anahera Press, 2017), 246 pp., $35 In Five Strings Apirana Taylor tells the story of Mack and Puti, a pair of alcoholic drug addicts living on the sickness benefit in an unnamed New Zealand city that’s likely Wellington. Mack, a street philosopher with a deep sense of Marxist […]
With But Half a Soul
Elizabeth Smither Heloise by Mandy Hager (Penguin Random House, 2017), 382 pp., $38 Hilary Mantel, in her second of five Reith Lectures, commented on the tendency of women writers to falsely empower female characters in history, in rather the same way we might attribute power and influence over her father to Ivanka Trump. She talks […]
A Black Market in Time Travel
Nicholas Reid Our Future is in the Air by Tim Corballis (Victoria University Press, 2017) 272 pp., $30 Sometime in the 1960s physicists discover a way of getting images from the future. But in the interests of proving that capitalism will be destroyed, the Soviet Union releases a photo from the future of twin towers […]
The Poetics of Planned Obsolescence
Jack Ross Milk Island by Rhydian Thomas (Lawrence & Gibson Publishing Collective, 2017), 256 pp., $30 This is a very strange book. I like it. I like it very much. It’s fair to say that this was not always the case. When I first picked it up I found it quite difficult to force myself […]
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