Sally Blundell The Girl Below, by Bianca Zander (Penguin, 2012), 324 pp. $30.00.   Notting Hill, London. Famous for its race riots, Portobello market and the 1999 film that pitched Julie Roberts and a simpering Hugh Grant into a romantic entanglement. For Suki Piper, newly arrived from a decade in New Zealand, the suburb she […]

Christine Johnston The Day She Cradled Me,by Sacha de Bazin (Random House, 2012), 319 pp., $37.99.   Minnie will swing – there’s no doubt about it. If you pick up this book, unaware of Williamina Dean’s claim to notoriety, you have only to turn it over and read: ‘A fascinating novel based on the life […]

Chris Else Love and Money, by Greg McGee (Penguin, 2012), 352 pp., $29.99.   In early 1980 one of my first attempts at a stage play was selected for the workshop at the National Playwright’s Conference. A short time later I was drinking in Wellington’s Southern Cross Hotel with a group of people that included […]

Elspeth Sandys All the Voices Cry, by Alice Petersen (Biblioasis, 2012) 158 pp., $27.00.   Short story collections are notoriously difficult to review. There is no requirement on the author’s part to create links from one story to another, or to explore themes that, broadly speaking, bind the parts together to make a whole. Sometimes […]

Tasha Haines Little Sister, by Julian Novitz, (Vintage, 2012), 256 pp., $29.99   The press release accompanying expat Julian Novitz’s novel Little Sister tells us that it is about ‘absent fathers, motivation and identity’, but more accurately it is about the damage caused by incest, the strength of teenage bonds, the power of role models […]

Azure Rissetto The Open World, by Stephanie Johnson (Vintage, 2012), 295 pp. $37.99.   In recent years there has been such a proliferation of writing set in the Victorian times that an entire ‘neo-Victorian’ genre has sprung up out of it. The period offers particularly fruitful pickings for literary endeavour, given that the legal possession […]

Mia Watkins The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse, by Fredrik Brouneus (Steam Press, Wellington 2012), 302 pp. $30.   Nobody is spared ridicule in Fredrik Brouneus’ comic science-fiction novel The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse. The narrative pokes light-hearted fun at mental health, American culture, scientists, alchemists, the Chinese government and what might be […]

Thomas Gough The Forrests, by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2012), 340 pp., $36.99.   Talking with friends and reading reviews of Emily Perkin’s latest novel, The Forrests, I came away bemused by the range of responses. The critics tended to be impressed but their admiration struck me as less than heartfelt, and the compliments were […]

David Herkt The Spaces Between, Russell Haley (Adastra Productions, 2012), 192 pp., $25.00.   ‘Only connect…’, E.M. Forster wrote in the well-known epigraph to Howards End in 1910 as a dictum for a new century,  but connectivity, seen historically, can be considered the one consistent human theme.             The lashed-together constructions of fronds and shells that made up the […]

Tim Jones The Intentions Book, by Gigi Fenster (Victoria University Press, 2012), 305 pp., $35.00.   To keep the reader interested, a long narrative needs an engine, something that revs up at the beginning and keeps the narrative motoring along from commencement to conclusion. Gigi Fenster has chosen a Rolls Royce of a story engine for […]

Emily Braunstein Brookes The Below Country, by Nicholas Edlin (Penguin, 2011) 275 pp. $30.   ‘You’ll never see the real thing,’ an American civil student mired in 1980s South Korea tells the narrator of The Below Country late in Nicholas Edlin’s second novel. ‘You think you know a thing, then the bastards move the frame.  I’ve […]

Tim Jones Hilary and David, by Laura Solomon (Proverse Hong Kong, 2011), 162 pp., $24.00.   Hilary and David is a novel told in the form of an exchange of letters — though actually, to be fair, since this a 2011 novel it’s told in the form of an exchange of Facebook messages; but they read more […]