Rachel O’Connor 

The Disinvent Movement by Susanna Gendall (Victoria University Press, 2021), 144pp., $30; Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Victoria University Press, 2021), 352pp., $35

In the very first, very short chapter of The Disinvent Movement, the narrator reveals a great deal: she lives in France, she is from New Zealand, and the cut on her head shaped like an Arabic letter was not caused by a fall at the swimming baths, despite the carefully rehearsed story to that effect that she recites for her doctor’s disinterested benefit. The implication is obvious: here is a victim of abuse living life in lies. But what is also immediately clear is that the narrator has an extraordinary capacity for distraction (so handy when someone is stitching your head together), which becomes a factor in both her salvation and her suffering. [Read more…]

Wendy Parkins

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane (Victoria University Press, 2020), 218 pp., $30; Victory Park by Rachel Kerr (Mākaro Press, 2020), 246 pp, $35

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane and Victory Park by Rachel Kerr are both debut novels longlisted in this year’s Ockham awards (Victory Park went on to win the prize for best first novel), but this is not the only thing these books have in common. They are both also about women living precariously.

Erin, the protagonist of The Swimmers, is a postgraduate student in Auckland working part time in an art gallery. Her tenuous hold on things is not due simply to limited employment prospects, nor to her tendency to self-sabotage—perhaps best represented by her dubious relationship choices. Lane’s novel deftly describes the existential uncertainties and mis-steps of early adulthood more generally, when the strong pull towards freedom and independence strains against the emotional bonds—and baggage—connecting us to our family of origin. [Read more…]

Vincent O’Sullivan 

More Miracle than Bird by Alice Miller (Tin House Books, 2020), 368pp., US$16.95

A couple of years ago I chanced on a book of poems by a New Zealander I had not heard of who lived in Europe. I was so struck by the collection’s range and emotional depth, by its formal poise, that I rightly guessed how, in the current whirlpool of New Zealand poetry, it was unlikely to catch the eye of our gatekeepers, or the judges of poetry prizes. In poem after poem, Alice Miller’s Nowhere Nearer took on forms and approaches of rare originality, and it stays with me as one of the books in recent years that I deeply admire. Among much else, Miller was a risk-taker. So it did not surprise me, when I saw her recent novel, that what she took on in prose was risk on a grand scale. [Read more…]

Emma Gattey

Ephemera by Tina Shaw (Cloud Ink Press, 2020), 285pp, $29.99

In this uncannily timed, eerily well-executed novel, Tina Shaw has rocked an antipodean remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, blending it with fertility, emotional depth, and a buxom archivist-librarian in place of a bristling, hero-worshipping Marlow. Before the virus, before the Crash, before any capitalised global disasters, Ephemera opens with a map charting the voyage south from Auckland to Huka Falls, just north of Taupō. There’s little but a boat icon and HoD epigraph to signal the hot journey ahead. Then, we enter an Aotearoa with no law, no electricity, no internet, no running water, no coffee. It has been seven years since the virus, the North Korea–US war, the Crash. The details are thin, but the extent of global catastrophe is slowly revealed. [Read more…]