Christine JohnstonHokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall (Penguin Books, 2011, $30) It’s a long time since I read a novel where the narrative voice is the outstanding and most memorable feature, perhaps even the whole point of the literary enterprise.  Charlotte Randall has created a likeable, though at times obtuse, first-person narrator, a Maori boy, making […]

Graeme LayThe Conductor, by Sarah Quigley (Vintage, 2011), 303 pp., $39.99. Sarah Quigley’s fourth novel opens with a small but ominous harbinger. In the spring of 1941, the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is informed by his friend, music teacher Ivan Sollertinsky, that two German diplomats have cancelled suit orders with Leningrad’s most reputable tailor. […]

Mia WatkinsWulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00 Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is […]

Anne Kennedy Fosterling, by Emma Neale (Random, 2010, $29.99) I’ve read two New Zealand novels recently that have on their covers walls of dense bush with arch-shaped escape-routes in them, through which can be seen the light at the end of the tunnel. First, Patrick Evans’ superb, mimetic Gifted, and now this layered and original […]

Jenny Powell Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99 This is one of the few books I have had dreams about. The sea in it ended up permeating my nights: images of a blue-black seething ocean — repetitious, insistent images that are as compelling to the reader as they are to […]

Lisa Samuels Kingdom of Alt, Jack Ross (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010) 240 pp., $45.00 If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the serial agonistic airs of that work, but it is  more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection […]

Siobhan Harvey From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Vintage, 2011), 348 pp., $29.99 Clothes: whether it’s the beret worn by Anna Sergeevna in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, or the beige raincoat donned by the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to be an Other Woman’, or Nie Chuanqing’s ‘blue gown of lined silk’ […]

Paul Sharrad Quinine, Kelly Ana Morey (Huia Publishers, 2010) 315 pp., NZ$35.00. When I was a teenager living in Port Moresby, my parents decided we would take our allotted leave in New Zealand. Full of touristic bonhomie, we chatted to a taxi driver who asked where we were from. ‘Papua’, we replied breezily. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is […]