Rebecca Styles

The Gulf Between by Maxine Alterio (Penguin, 2019) 299 pp., $38

Julia sits by her son’s hospital bed in Queenstown, sifting through memories and secrets as she tries to recall how her family fell apart in the Gulf of Naples. She had travelled there in the early 1960s with her husband Ben and their children Matteo (10) and Francesca (8). Julia’s husband grew up in Napoli and left after the war, but he’s been called back to look after his mother, Alessia, the matriarch of the family. [Read more…]

Francis Cooke

Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh (Lawrence & Gibson, 2018), 284 pp., $25

Midway through Women in the Field, One and Two, art writer and curator Ruth Bishops begins to assemble an exhibit based on the two titular paintings by her friend and frequent antagonist, Russian émigrée artist Irina Durova. Searching through the artist’s archive of paintings, she asks for work from 1912, the same year that the Women in the Field works were created, explaining to Irina that these will ‘give people a sense of how your work developed, what you were painting at the same time … explain Women in the Field’. ‘[T]hey don’t explain each other, they just happened,’ Irina retorts, ‘some at the same time, some later. Everything can’t be reduced to a straight line. Exhibitions like that are a lie.’ [Read more…]

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…]