James Norcliffe

Eddy, Eddy by Kate de Goldi (Allen & Unwin, 2022), 288pp, $29.99

Kate de Goldi’s scintillating novel Eddy, Eddy, tells the story of the eponymous Eddy Smallbone, 19, a school dropout and now part-time dog walker and shift worker at New World and his journey through the last months of 2012, two years after the first earthquake that shook Christchurch.

This book’s title is instructive: Eddy suggests swirl and turmoil, while the repetition suggests both exasperation and a plea. Eddy’s life is swirling. He is an orphan, living with his uncle, always referred to as Brain, one of a quartet of mildly eccentric friends and relatives who keep a kindly eye on him. Although he had been a potential scholarship candidate, personal issues compelled him to leave school for menial work; his love life has fallen apart and there are clearly deeper issues that, in the meantime, remain diffuse and unexplained. This mystery provides the subtle tension underlying the plot, and the reveal, when it comes, is more of a sad confirmation than a rug-pull, but striking for all of that. Foregrounded are day-to-day events and the dance of off-beat characters, with their rich and fascinating conversations and minor obsessions. [Read more…]

Tina Shaw

Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath (Text Publishing, 2022), 320pp, $38

I first read the Paper Cage in manuscript form when judging the 2022 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize, for which it was shortlisted. It went on to win the Michael Gifkins Text Prize for an Unpublished Novel and Tom Baragwanath received a generous advance and publication by Australian company Text Publishing. So, it’s a crime novel that’s had a fine start to life. [Read more…]

Gina Cole

Aljce in Therapy Land by Alice Tawhai (Lawrence & Gibson, 2022), 282pp, $25

Aljce In Therapy Land is a funny take on the dark and upsetting subject of workplace bullying. It is dedicated to everyone who has ever been bullied at work or bullied and controlled in any way by anyone. There is also a mad neighbour, an online romance and many marijuana-fuelled existential conversations.  [Read more…]

David Herkt

The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem by Luke Elworthy (The Wairau Division, 2022), 327pp, $35

‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ begins the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It is also an appropriate epigraph for Luke Elworthy’s The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem, a novel that explores a story of ‘families’, both happy and unhappy. The life history of a character in a familial setting has been a mainstay of fiction since the 19th century, and Elworthy is certainly not the first writer to address the primal mystery of parenthood, generational secrets, sibling relationships, and even the incest taboo itself.  [Read more…]