Felicity Murray All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman (Penguin Random House NZ, 2016), 319 pp., $38 I am almost ashamed to admit that I have only ever read one other book written by Dame Fiona Kidman, and that was way back in my teens when her first novel, A Breed of Women, was […]

Max Oettli Daylight Second by Kelly Ana Morey (HarperCollins NZ, 2016), 352 pp., $36.99 We take pictures, we write; some of us come up with interesting, even beautiful stuff, but invariably the person doing it for a job is more reliable, more comprehensible and has more follow through in the job they do. In this […]

Christine Johnston The Salted Air by Thom Conroy (Random House NZ Vintage, 2016), 302 pp,. $38 Where should a first-person novel begin? With the narrator’s conception or birth? Or further down the track: What I think of as my origin, my actual first moment, is borrowed from a picture that was kept among hundreds in […]

Raewyn Alexander  Deleted Scenes for Lovers by Tracey Slaughter (Victoria University Press, 2016), 227 pp., $30 Mainly these contemporary tales include lovely, believable, startling, even sometimes disturbing, streams of consciousness, which intersect with and illuminate well-realised imagery and action. This curious, lively book provoked in me effervescent, warped and fractured notions which I carried around […]

Jennifer Lawn The Gentlemen’s Club by Jen Shieff (Mary Egan Publishing, 2015), 281 pp., $30 There are two kinds of gentlemen’s clubs in Jen Shieff’s debut novel set in Auckland in the mid-1950s. The harmless kind are the neighbourhood brothels run by Rita Saunders and other rival madams in the adult entertainment business. A woman […]

Felicity Murray The Blackbird Sings at Dusk by Linda Olsson (Penguin NZ, 2016), 253 pp., $38 Linda Olsson is Swedish by birth but has lived outside Sweden since 1986, and in New Zealand since 1990. Her first novel, Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, was very favourably received and made some good circuits in the […]

Tim Jones Dad Art by Damien Wilkins (Victoria University Press, 2016), 230 pp., $30 Dad Art is a short, easily read and quickly digested novel, set in a very recognisable contemporary Wellington. Its opening pages are full of cultural signifiers that I share with the protagonist: Game of Thrones box sets; Bill Manhire’s Twitter musings; […]

Murray Edmond Something Else by David Parkyn (Piedog Press, 2015), 388 pp., $38 The novel Something Else is bold in scale: its embrace reaches from the early 1960s, as seen from a marginal bohemian section of society, to the ‘more-or-less present’ (mention of the Christchurch earthquake locates the present time of the novel not earlier […]

Nicholas Reid King Rich, by Joe Bennett (Harper-Collins/Fourth Estate, 2015), 290 pp., $36.99 According to a publisher’s flyer, a mate in a pub told Joe Bennett that, after Christchurch’s big shake in 2011, thermal imaging detected somebody living in a condemned luxury hotel in the central city’s red zone. ‘Who could such a person possibly […]

Piet Nieuwland Mean, by Michael Botur ( Michael Botur Publications, 2014), 204 pp., $6.66 This second collection from the Whangarei writer Michael Botur contains fifteen short stories that are closely observed, energetic and original. With a wry humour, they depict people on the margins of society who are struggling to survive, people who are up […]