Simone Oettli Frederick’s Coat, by Alan Duff, (Random House, 2013), 288 pp., $ 37.99 When I first received Frederick’s Coat to review I thought Alan Duff had written another book about a life of fighting and crime in the underworld, but although the novel both starts off and ends that way, it soon takes a […]

Kirstine Moffat The Elusive Language of Ducks, by Judith White, (Vintage, 2013), 376 pp., $37.99 Judith White’s second novel, published 13 years after her acclaimed Across the Dreaming Night, features both her signature ability to sensitively evoke the interior lives of the broken, anxious and grieving, and her deft talent for juxtaposing the poignant with […]

Tasha Haines I’m Working on a Building, by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, 2013), 200 pp., $30. I unwrapped this small novel and scanned it back and front: I’m Working on a Building by Pip Adam, PhD in writing from Victoria University. On the front there’s a photo of the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building […]

Raewyn Alexander The Mannequin Makers, by Craig Cliff (Vintage, 2013), 333 pp., $37.99. This book, set in colonial New Zealand, manifests as historical fiction. Something fresh too, a twist on what has already been written. With enough authentic detail to make everything appear believable, a step back in time. Fiction set in the past also […]

Tim Jones Theatre of the Gods, by M. Suddain (Jonathan Cape, 2013), 622 pp., RRP $36.99. A case can be made that science fiction is a decadent genre. Not decadent in the ‘Roman orgies’ sense – though, of course, it can be that too – but decadent in the sense that the tropes of the […]

Patricia McLean The Virgin and the Whale, by Carl Nixon, (Vintage, 2013), 261 pp., $37.99 In Carl Nixon’s latest ‘novel’, The Virgin and the Whale, the stories within stories multiply like rabbits, and each one is a delight. This so-called novel has an unusual genesis. In his introduction, Nixon explains that an elderly gentleman (identified […]

Jack Ross The Wind City, by Summer Wigmore, (Steam Press, Wellington, 2013), 319 pp., $NZ30. ‘Want to go get that drink now?’ Steff said. ‘We can watch old episodes of Buffy or Doctor Who or something.’ ‘You are so immensely geeky,’ Saint said, ‘you’re, like, Geeky McGeekface, sole resident of Geekville, Silicon Valley. But,’ he […]

Michael O’Leary Blood and Koka Kola, by Christodoulos E.G. Moisa, (One Eyed Press, Whanganui, 2013), 238 pp, $28. Christodoulos Moisa is known in New Zealand bohemian circles as an artist, poet and a publisher. He established his One Eyed Press in the early 1970s when his friend, fellow poet and sometime academic Mark Williams told […]

Kelly Ana Morey In The Memorial Room, by Janet Frame (Text Publishing, 2013), 202 pp. $35. That Janet Frame, she’s pretty funny. But I’ve known this about her writing for some time. It’s not a slap your thighs and roar out loud funny, granted, but Frame knows how to hit the sweetest spot when it comes […]