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 dependable. As a young man he once dismantled great ships piece by piece, but as the story begins it is Peter who is being pulled apart. His wife Moira has recently died, his grown son Aaron has absented himself, and Peter’s career and reputation are spiralling downwards. As the three epigraph poems suggest, paternity and grief are present from the first page of Chapter One. But Peter also revisits his past. Abigail, the baby daughter he lost, and Geneviève, the woman he once loved and abandoned, both haunt his thoughts. In addition, Peter uncovers a secret that, within this place of grief and loss, forces him to question his marriage, his life and his sense of self. Set mainly in New Zealand, but with action that navigates India and Pakistan, the UK and Europe, The New Ships is the story of Peter’s re-examination of his actions—or inactions—and of what it is to be a father, husband and son. [Read more…]

Linda Burgess

Mazarine by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, 2018), 288 pp., $38

Frances’ daughter Maya is travelling in Europe and hasn’t contacted her mother for two and a half weeks. Maya’s friends and colleagues are disconcertingly evasive. When going for a walk with her dog, Frances meets her ex, who’s never usually in this part of Auckland. Scent triggers memories, but, paradoxically, the smell of dogshit evokes a happy time spent in Menton as a child. Frances’ mother Inez isn’t really her mother: she’s adopted. And Inez – an estate agent, her smiling face appearing regularly on signs around Auckland, ‘renowned for being kind and good, honest and selfless’ – isn’t nearly as sweet as she appears. We learn in the first few pages of Grimshaw’s latest novel that things are not as they seem. [Read more…]

Denis Harold

Rotoroa by Amy Head (Victoria University Press, 2018), 248 pp., $30

Amy Head’s first novel Rotoroa is at times beguiling and vivid in its evocation of New Zealand’s repressed social milieu after World War II. Through the eyes and occasionally the consciousness of several main characters, Head traces undercurrents of change toward more honesty and openness. [Read more…]