Ruth Brown

The Life of De’Ath by Majella Cullinane (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2018), 242pp., $34.99

If Mephistopheles has been making a comeback, it’s in new guises appropriate for societies that don’t believe in hell: in London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse production of Doctor Faustus, she was a mischievously jolly best friend rather than the embodiment of evil. In Majella Cullinane’s multi-layered debut novel, he’s an amiable and reliable narrator, and somewhat dissatisfied with his other-worldly status: there’s a clever twist at the end to explain his real identity and motivation. [Read more…]

Alice Tawhai

A Change of Key by Adrienne Jansen (Escalator Press, 2018), 252 pp., $28

I love all the musics, but classical is my least familiar, so I wondered how I might go with Adrienne Jansen’s new novel, A Change of Key. I wasn’t even that fussed on the title, which seemed a little mundane. But music is joy, and Adrienne does good joy. Life mightn’t be flawless, but there’s music.

Using the perfect strategy of setting her story in a block of flats, Adrienne is able to show us rather than tell us (as the rules wisely decree) the lives of people who, like migratory birds, have somehow blown off course and found themselves in a cage with an open door, here at the end of the world. Their lives are rich in terms of lived experience rather than money, and political, financial and personal wind currents may prevent them from ever returning to their original place of departure. The narrative is told through the carefully plotted unfolding of the characters’ conversations and thoughts, and each short chapter is an opportunity to lay out more of the story, sometimes with a smidgeon of plot action. [Read more…]

Michael Morrissey

Words and Water by John Parkyn (Atzimba Press, 2017), 220 pp., $30

Many decades ago John Parkyn and I worked in the proofreading room of the Herald. We were aspirant writers. At my count, there were at least four (maybe five) hopeful writers in total. Proofreading rooms were like that in the 70s – would-be artists, poets, miscellaneous misfits, left-wing desperados, people who had not yet found their niche were part of the mix. Plus ‘seagulls’ (casual employees on the wharf) and posties. Writers just seemed to emerge out of this diverse compote. Today, writers go to university and do courses in creative writing. [Read more…]

Holly Walker

All Our Secrets by Jennifer Lane (Rosa Mira Books, 2018), 276 pp., $30

Ostensibly, All Our Secrets is a book about a series of murders, and about a religious commune that moves in to live uncomfortably alongside a conservative rural New South Wales town, Coongahoola, in the 1980s. There’s a mystery to be solved, and an eleven-year-old protagonist, Gracie, from whose perspective we hear the story. It defies genre: it could be young adult fiction for mature readers, or an adult novel rendered from a child’s perspective.

What sticks with me most after putting it down for the second time, though, is not the mystery but the portrayal of family life, and what this book has to say about love and parenting.  [Read more…]

Majella Cullinane

Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine, 2018), 280 pp., $35

A passion for music, and its ability to connect the most dissimilar of women, Eva McAlester and Grace Coles, lies at the heart of the novel Gone to Pegasus. Divided into four parts that correspond to musical tempos, the story is set in February 1892, and from the outset provides the reader with vivid, engaging evocations of place: Dunedin, New Delhi and Lake Wakatipu.

The novel opens in Dunedin, and we follow twenty-year-old Eva as she leaves her house on Pitt Street, walks past Knox Church, through the Octagon and on to Princes Street. Eva is about to audition for a part in a choir, and as she passes three men playing Vivaldi she is reminded that her husband has been incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. [Read more…]