Ray Grover

All This By Chance by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 335pp., $35

Readers do not need to finish the first paragraph of this novel before they find themselves succumbing to the authority of an accomplished storyteller. Sinking into Vincent O’Sullivan’s prose is like sliding into a Rotorua pool; once enveloped you become more a participant than a reader, soaking up details rather than heeding them. It is only afterwards, when you begin reflecting, that you wonder what actually happened. Like when life has delivered you an event that you realise is more than the sum of its parts, and you look back to try to discover the nature of those parts and their connections – as, from time to time, O’Sullivan’s characters themselves are compelled to do. This ability to lead readers to involve themselves in the story almost as deeply as the characters contributes immensely towards Vincent O’Sullivan’s achievement. [Read more…]

Rebecca Styles

Ocean of Milk by Belinda Aycrigg (99 percent press, 2018) 473 pp., $30

Amalia wakes up in hospital with no memory. She doesn’t remember her husband Jay or her children Sammie and Mattie. She still has language – she can read – but the words for objects have gone. This is the exciting premise of Belinda Aycrigg’s first novel, written during the Master’s of Creative Writing programme at Auckland University of Technology. The dream that almost every writing student has was realised when one of her external examiners wanted to publish her book. It’s an ambitious debut. [Read more…]

Paula Morris 

The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke by Tina Makereti (Vintage, 2018), 304pp., $38

For a novel that travels the world, there’s a quiet intimacy to the beginning of Tina Makereti’s second novel. Its protagonist is a young Māori man called many names, who experiences a series of devastating, dramatic adventures. When the novel opens he’s a feverish invalid confined to bed, ‘in the shadows’ and alert to ‘the brokenness of the world’. Hemi is one of his names and he’s in London, we learn, for a second visit. It’s almost a decade into Queen Victoria’s reign, and Hemi is tended through what he suspects may be a final illness. How did he get here, and why is he so haunted by apparitions from the past? [Read more…]

Tina Shaw

The Sound of Breaking Glass by Kirsten Warner (Mākaro Press, 2018), 290 pp., $35

In a Spinoff article (21 November 2018), writer Kirsten Warner, referencing the Holocaust, has commented, ‘It was a surprise to me that there were other people who saw the barbed wire behind the eyelids. My father hadn’t been in a camp, but I still had the horrors.’ She goes on to say: ‘I wanted to write a story from the next generation’s point of view, to stay there and not be diverted into the big, overshadowing parental one.’

In her debut novel Warner explores this concept through Christel, the daughter of Holocaust survivor Conrad and his wife Stella – although the parental story, looming large, still shapes and informs much of the work. [Read more…]

Rajorshi Chakraborti
The Crazed Wind by Nod Ghosh (Truth Serum Press, 2018), 140 pp., $12.00; Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones (Seizure by Brio Books, 2018), 172 pp., $20

In an essay from his 1995 collection Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera dreams eloquently about novelists freeing themselves from orthodox expectations of plotting, scene-setting and chronology:

That is what delighted me about [Rabelais] and … about other early novelists: they talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming: of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city; of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which … the novelist would never be forced – for the sake of form and its dictates – to stray by even a single line from what [she] cares about, what fascinates [her]. (Kundera, 157–58) [Read more…]