Gail Pittaway

What You Wish For by Catherine Robertson (Penguin Random House, 2019), 384 pp., $38

What You Wish For seems, at first, too simplistic a title from this fine novelist whose talent for comedy and character delineation puts her among our best sellers. But it transpires that, as in Gabriel’s Bay, Robertson’s previous book and the setting for both novels, characters must indeed be attentive to the outcome of their wishes. That’s if they know what they wish for, in the first place. Calling up questions of human desires, wish fulfilment and self-realisation, this novel explores human vulnerability, humorously, through the residents of a small beach-side town somewhere, anywhere, in New Zealand. [Read more…]

Alison Wong

Lonely Asian Woman by Sharon Lam (Lawrence and Gibson, 2019) 183 pp., $29

When you read a book published by Lawrence and Gibson, you know you’re going to get something a little different. After all, on their website under 9 Fun Facts About Us, they describe themselves as ‘a collective that publishes literary fiction skewered towards the morose, satirical, verbose and thoughtful’; and each of the other facts is amusingly off-kilter.

I read the blurb on the back cover of Sharon Lam’s debut novel. The protagonist, Paula, is a young Asian woman. But Paula bucks the stereotype of the industrious, responsible and super-achieving Asian young person. She’s lazy and ‘mired in a rut’, and this ‘is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world’.

Or is it? [Read more…]

Ben Brown

Novel by Vaughan Rapatahana (Rangitawa Publishing, 2018), 320pp., $38

‘In our contemporary world of increasing electronic surveillance from hegemonic national administrations, several diverse characters struggle to survive and to resist in a variety of ways. At the same time the so-called established methods of writing fiction undergo deconstruction.’

The italics are mine but the quote is lifted from the back cover blurb of this, Vaughan Rapatahana’s second novel, an earlier version of which was long-listed for the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

The assertion of deconstruction is intriguing. I have to confess, it’s one of those terms I’d always associated more with architecture and a desire to reinterpret a structure as fragmented rather than unified or symmetrical. [Read more…]

Charlotte Grimshaw

A Mistake by Carl Shuker (Victoria University Press, 2019), 184 pp., $30

In a 2007 article in the New Yorker, surgeon and health researcher Atul Gawande wrote an account of the medical profession’s evolving approach to mistakes. During surgery and afterwards in ICU, a typical patient will require hundreds of procedures, all of which can result in life-threatening complications if not implemented correctly. As medicine advances and the methods for saving patients become more elaborate and numerous, the risks mount up. Avoiding mistakes is an important issue, given that one relatively small error can lead to potentially fatal consequences. [Read more…]

Ray Grover

All This By Chance by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 335pp., $35

Readers do not need to finish the first paragraph of this novel before they find themselves succumbing to the authority of an accomplished storyteller. Sinking into Vincent O’Sullivan’s prose is like sliding into a Rotorua pool; once enveloped you become more a participant than a reader, soaking up details rather than heeding them. It is only afterwards, when you begin reflecting, that you wonder what actually happened. Like when life has delivered you an event that you realise is more than the sum of its parts, and you look back to try to discover the nature of those parts and their connections – as, from time to time, O’Sullivan’s characters themselves are compelled to do. This ability to lead readers to involve themselves in the story almost as deeply as the characters contributes immensely towards Vincent O’Sullivan’s achievement. [Read more…]