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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Of Magpies and Mountains

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Gina Cole

Butcherbird by Cassie Hart (Huia, 2021), 356pp, $25

Cassie Hart’s supernatural thriller Butcherbird won the 2022 Sir Julius Vogel Award for best novel. Hart has previously self-published novels and novellas as well as short fiction under pen names J.C. Hart and Nova Black. Butcherbird is her first work published by Huia. It is a project Hart worked on as a participant of Te Papa Tupu, a writers’ incubator designed for emerging Māori writers. Hart writes speculative fiction and paranormal romance, and Butcherbird sits more towards the supernatural, horror, suspense side of speculative fiction. It is set in rural Taranaki where Hart grew up and, fittingly, Taranaki Maunga features as a guardian-like presence in the book, watching over events as they slowly unfold in the narrative.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

Short Stories, Big Pictures

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Iona Winter

Beats of the Pa’u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 152pp, $30; Peninsula by Sharron Came (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 256pp, $30

Maria Samuela, of Cook Islands descent, has an MA from the IIML, and her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. Beats of the Pa’u is her debut collection, told via a community of first and second generation Cook Islands New Zealanders, from the 1950s through to the present day. 

From start to finish, Beats of the Pa’u provides multiple points of view within its stories, often correlating in central themes, such as grief, immigration, and love. The clever use of shifting focus between protagonists also links us to another generation’s experiential history. With apparent ease, these stories straddle worlds of religion, shame, compliance, tradition, and how younger generations often strive to embrace alternate identities. Samuela excels at showing lived experience and, with an intimate knowledge of her culture underpinning each story, she draws us in whilst also evoking compassion and laughter. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

Six of the Best

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Charlotte Grimshaw

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand’s best writers, ed. Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2021), 560pp, $40

One day recently, when we were in the middle of a discussion about the current pandemic, perhaps the Delta surge we’d just overcome in Auckland or the projected peak of the Omicron wave, my mother’s expression turned glazed and distant and she began to describe another pandemic in another time: the polio outbreak in her childhood that closed the schools, setting her and her sisters and friends free to roam and run wild for a whole summer. And it was, she said, now she remembered it, an exceptionally long, hot summer like the drought in Auckland in 2020 and 2021, when the parks turned brown, the streams dried up, the skies every day were cloudless blue, and for her, back then, there was nothing to be done but swim and bike for miles and dream your way through another day, a gang of kids liberated from the world of school and clocks and teachers and parents, just for a time. The adults must have been fearful (infantile paralysis, the horrifying threat of the ‘iron lung’: what could be more terrifying for a parent?) but she remembered it as dreamy, idyllic, timeless, mercifully free from the tyranny of phones and computers and Zoom. No Google school, no remote learning; you could read a book under a tree, and other than that, some lessons might arrive in the mail every now and then. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (Text Publishing, 2021), 272 pp, $38

By the end of the first paragraph of Gigi Fenster’s gripping novel, we know something is amiss. ‘It was a good winter’, her narrator, Olga, tells us. ‘For me it was a good winter. For Lara even. I don’t care what anyone says. The facts spoke for themselves.’ But as with Dickens, after the memorable opening of A Tale of Two Cities, the spring of hope turns into a winter of, if not despair, then foolishness and darkness. Relentlessly, inexorably, the tension implicit in this first defensive statement builds into a portrait of obsessive neediness (‘I’m not needy’, Olga says repeatedly) that drives the plot to its horrific ending on the very last page. That Fenster never slackens the pace or signposts exactly who will pay the price for her narrator’s deranged thinking is a credit to the author’s hold on the storyline and an indication of her unflagging allegiance to the manipulative, delusional and utterly awful nature of her main character.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

Moments More

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Melanie Dixon

Breach of all Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice, edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni (The Cuba Press, 2022), 98pp, $30 

Thirty-six writers, thirty-six stories, 421 words each. This anthology attempts to bridge two worlds—that of Joyce and his modernist epic Ulysses, published 100 years ago, and the foundation of ancient Venice in the year 421. It seems a slightly odd premise for a modern collection of flash fiction, but the joining of themes from Joyce’s classic novel and the city of Venice has produced an astounding anthology featuring some of the best flash fiction writers in New Zealand. Between the covers of this slim edition there is an abundance of bridges, a whole cast of characters called Antonio, a healthy dose of Vivaldi and chamber music, numerous battered copies of Joyce’s novels, glimpses of Ireland and a few cameo appearances by Captain James Cook. With central themes of love, loss and time—and the slow sinking of a city beneath the pressure of the ever-encroaching sea—change is at the heart of this collection. [Read more…]

Filed Under: anthology, fiction, literature

What a Human Muddle

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was originally published in Landfall 242 and is republished here in memory of Stephen Stratford (1953–2021). A fine editor and reviewer, Stratford made an invaluable contribution to Aotearoa literature over many years.

Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt, Volume 2 1973–2004 by Philip Temple (David Ling Publishing Limited, 2021), 352pp, $44.99

Another marvellous performance from Philip Temple with multiple plots and time-lines expertly interwoven. As with Volume 1, it is a triumph of research and narrative skill. But what is missing is a subtitle. Perhaps this quote from Shadbolt: ‘What a human muddle I leave in my wake.’

God, this book is grim reading. Not the author’s fault—it is entirely the subject’s. There are many upsetting passages but none more so than when Shadbolt’s daughter Tui came up from Wellington by train, on her own, and he refused to see her. She was twelve. [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, literature

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