Chris Else My Brother’s Keeper, by Donna Malane (HarperCollins, 2013), 272 pp., $29.99 All fiction is escapist. A reader of a novel looks to be transported into a special place that the late Nigel Cox called ‘Fictionland’. In addition, our approach to fiction wanders between two poles: we want the excitement of the new and the […]

Azure Rissetto Lives We Leave Behind, by Maxine Alterio (Penguin, 2012), 282 pp., $38.   Next year marks the centenary of what has alternately been known as the Great War, the European War, or ‘the war to end all wars.’ The most familiar term is the First World War (WWI), with its embedded reminder that […]

Tasha Haines No Second Chance, by Mark Stephenson (Steele Roberts, 2011) 268 pp. $29.99.   ‘What was beyond that iridescent fringe, the interior of those islands on the edge of the world?’ Wonders Anna, aged eleven, while looking at the South Sea Islands in a book at her school in Austria. It is a hint of […]

Tim Jones The Shingle Bar Sea Monster and Other Stories, by Laura Solomon (Proverse Hong Kong, 2012), 200 pp., USD 22.00.   Realism is the meat and two veg of New Zealand fiction: thick, chunky and nourishing. In our country, we have dozens of realisms: mimetic realism, critical realism, social realism, socialist realism … well, maybe […]

Tasha Haines      The Phoenix Song, by John Sinclair (VUP, 2012) 383 pp., $38. In ancient times the Chinese Phoenix or Fenghuang had the beak of a rooster, the face of a swallow, the forehead of a fowl, the neck of a snake, the breast of a goose, the back of a tortoise, the hindquarters of a […]

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman I Got His Blood On Me – Frontier Tales, by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, 2012), 270pp. $35.00.   There are many ways of learning about history and fictional accounts have always been one; Lawrence Patchett’s ‘frontier tales’ present themselves at first as short lessons in local history, delivered in stories of […]

Helen Watson White Gorse is not People: New and Uncollected Stories, Janet Frame (Penguin Group NZ, 2013), 252pp., $40   This is a gem of a book, or rather a string of gems, each uniquely coloured, cut and crafted.  Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold, trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust, in gathering twenty-eight Frame stories […]

Kirstine Moffat Skylark, by Jenny Pattrick (Black Swan, Auckland 2012), 329 pp., $37.99.   The subtitle of Jenny Pattrick’s new novel captures the spirit and style of Skylark. This is most certainly ‘An Entertainment’, innovative in its structure and filled with an exuberant joie de vive. I was captivated from the first vignette of the […]

Michael Morrissey Soon, by Charlotte Grimshaw, (Vintage, 2012), $37.99. Charlotte Grimshaw’s star has never glowed brighter. Here she is with four novels under her belt, plus two critically acclaimed short story collections. And over the course of her fiction, Simon Lampton, a successful Remuera surgeon, has become her perennial standout character. He appeared in earlier […]

Emily Braunstein Brookes Risk, by CK Stead (MacLehose, 2012) 266 pp. $29.99 The back cover blurb for C.K. Stead’s latest novel, Risk, describes it as a ‘novel of our times’ and Stead, in his eightieth year, hits all of the major points of what has certainly been so far the most defining decade in a […]