Simone Oettli Chappy, by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, 2015), 253 pp., $38 Readers have been eagerly awaiting Patricia Grace’s seventh novel, Chappy, for more than a decade. Her penultimate novel, Tu, came out in 2004, and the last of her seven short-story collections, Small Holes in the Silence, dates from 2006. Since then, however, […]

Raewyn Alexander  An Imitation of Life, by Laura Solomon (Proverse Hong Kong, 2013), 296 pp., n.p. Local oddity Celia relays her eye-popping adventures with startling clarity. All the more surprising considering the difficulties she experienced since being left on a doorstep as a baby. Celia is a giantess, she also ages at three times the […]

Brian Clearkin The Invisible Mile by David Coventry (Victoria University Press, 2015), 319 pp., $30 As with any novel, we check the jacket notes and ascertain the framework of the plot. Back in 1928, a team of Australian and NZ cyclists became the first English-speaking riders to participate in the Tour de France. The tour […]

Ted Jenner No Relation by Thomas Pors Koed (Titus Books, 2015), 185 pp., $30 In Thomas Pors Koed’s short story entitled ‘Home Run’, one of the most extraordinary sentences in a book full of such sentences offers the revelation that one of the escapees ‘has been eating a bird and there is blood on her […]

Helen Watson White The Hiding Places by Catherine Robertson (Vintage, 2015), 350 pp., $36.99 I can understand why Catherine Robertson’s earlier novels were bestsellers – all three topped the sales list in New Zealand. I can also understand why the German publisher who had accepted her first two books decided against publishing the third, The […]

Emily Brookes In the Neighbourhood of Fame, by Bridget van der Zijpp, (Victoria University Press, 2015), 272 pp., $30 In 1968 Andy Warhol foresaw a future in which everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. How amazing that a man living close to three decades before the age of the internet could be so prescient. Today, when […]

James Dignan New Hokkaido, by James McNaughton (Victoria University Press, 2015), 224 pp., $30 Imagine a world where Japan did not attack Pearl Harbour in 1941, but rather continued its gradual accumulation by invasion of smaller states; where the 1980s see an alliance of the Soviet Union and Japan controlling mainland Europe, as well as […]

Tasha Haines  The Legend of Winstone Blackhat, by Tanya Moir (Random House/Vintage, 2015), 240 pp., $37.99 How do you write an entertaining, tender and emotionally pared-back story set against a background of family dysfunction, violence and sexual abuse? Tanya Moir has managed to achieve this and more in The Legend of Winstone Blackhat, a story […]

Georgina McWhirter Lamplighter, by Kerry Donovan Brown (Victoria University Press, 2014), 160 pp., $28 Several things place this novel as Young Adult. The 18-year-old protagonist and coming of age story, most importantly. Also, at least going by convention, the shorter novella-like word count (though it has to be said recent YA novels seem to be […]

Chris Else  Reach, by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, 2014), 288 pp., $38 The blurb for Laurence Fearnley’s most recent novel, Reach, tells us that the book is ‘about risk-taking and the ways in which creativity, struggle and danger enrich people’s lives’. We shouldn’t take blurbs too seriously – they inevitably include at least a modicum of […]

Jack Ross MiStory, by Philip Temple (Font Publishing, Dunedin, 2014), 271 pp., $34.99 Political dystopias – extrapolations of worrying contemporary social trends into the near future (or the far distance) – have a distinguished history in English. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) might be seen as the prototype, but Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is probably […]