David Herkt The Children’s Pond, by Tina Shaw (Pointer Press, 2014), 275 pp., $29.99 As with any colonial and post-colonial literature, the sense of place is arguably the dominant feature of New Zealand writing. Human ease and unease within a landscape is our grand theme. One of the most cited examples is the central incident […]
This Bloody War
Helen Watson White Passing Through by Coral Atkinson (Dancing Tuatara, 2014), 345 pp., $34.95 Coral Atkinson’s third historical novel, Passing Through, makes a good holiday read with its many-sided plot, interesting and well-defined characters, and its feeling for the troubled yet reckless mood here following World War I. The war itself is described as it […]
Running to Keep in the Same Place
Emily Brookes The Red Queen by Gemma Bowker-Wright (Victoria University Press, 2014), 220 pp., $30 The Red Queen, an accomplished if imperfect collection of short stories from debut author Gemma Bowker-Wright, is at its best when it manages to transcend allegory to reveal rounded characters manoeuvring through compelling and tensely charged situations. At its most […]
Addressing and Naming the Unknown
David Herkt The Naturalist by Thom Conroy (Vintage, 2014), 381 pp., $37.99 The German mid-nineteenth-century scientific explorers of New Zealand conducted an extraordinary project of revealing a new colony in the midst of a great transition. They described the natural and indigenous social environments of an isolated archipelago, the last country in the world before […]
No Happy Ever After
Christine Johnston Tenderness: Stories by Sarah Quigley (Vintage/Random House, 2014), 347 pp., $37.99 It was a comment my aunt made that led me to ruin my life. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, standing tall amongst the blossom, ‘don’t let her become a writer. Anything else, for God’s sake. Anything but a writer.’ So begins the […]
Lighting the Path to Otahuhu
Tasha Haines Purgatory by Rosetta Allan (Penguin Books NZ, 2014), 328 pp., $30 I was halfway through reading Rosetta Allan’s novel Purgatory when I googled ‘the Otahuhu murders of 1865’ upon which her storyline is based. The first thing I found was an article from the Daily Southern Cross newspaper of 25 December 1865, reporting […]
Buttons Aren’t Cheap Anymore
Thom Conroy Cowboy Genes by Wes Lee (Grist Books/Valley Press, UK, 2014), 64 pp., no price; The Glove Box and Other Stories by Vivienne Plumb (Spineless Wonders, 2014), 150 pp., $30 While Cowboy Genes is Wes Lee’s first collection of short fiction, she is no stranger to the genre, being the 2010 recipient of the […]
Who Dumped the Mattress in the Fennel?
Jimmy Currin Astonished Dice by Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, 2014), 240 pp., $30 My dad was very fond of the movies. ‘See,’ he’d tell me – I was not much more than a toddler – ‘they showed a close-up on her shoes. That’ll be important later on.’ Like the father of Bruno Swan in […]
Three Years at Sea
Brian Clearkin James Cook’s New World, by Graeme Lay (HarperCollins, 2014), 368 pp., $37 Ah – if only we could have had such literary works in schooldays, when our prescribed textbooks fiercely competed against each other for dryness and boredom. Graeme Lay has done a masterful re-creation of James Cook’s late-eighteenth-century world and given us […]
Igniting in Small Puffs
Lynley Edmeades Edwin’s Egg and other Poetic Novellas, by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press, 2014), 264 pp., $39.95 Reviewing Cilla McQueen’s recent collection of poetic novellas is a bit like trying to explain a rainbow to your colour-blind brother-in-law – it is difficult to find language capacious enough. At its most simple, Edwin’s Egg is […]
Father’s Final Friend
Patricia McLean Carnival Sky, by Owen Marshall (Random House: Vintage, 2014), 296 pp., $37.99 Two recent novels I’ve read – Owen Marshall’s Carnival Sky and Javier Marias’s The Infatuations – each explore middle-class neuroses, New Zealand- and Spanish-style respectively. Is this a coincidence, or are more novelists nowadays writing about themselves and their milieu – […]
Nasty, Vindictive People
Elspeth Sandys Landscape with Solitary Figure, by Shonagh Koea (Random House: Vintage, 2014), 264 pp., $29.99 Reading Landscape with Solitary Figure, Shonagh Koea’s latest novel, the question ‘does the author mean us to take this story seriously?’ began as a whisper but became, by the end, an insistent shout in my head. All the familiar […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- …
- 32
- Next Page »