Andrew Paul Wood

The Name on the Door is not Mine: Stories new and selected by C.K. Stead (Allen & Unwin, 2016), 304 pp., $39.99

New Zealand’s doyen of literary criticism, senior poet and writer of fiction, C.K. Stead, now in his eighth decade, needs very little introduction, though reviewing his books is not without a certain trepidation given his reputation. In my defence, I declare myself a provincial nobody. If Cheever is, as Elmore Leonard put it, ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’, then Stead is the ex-pat Cheever of taking tea with Mrs Phlaccus and Professor Channing-Cheetah, not without the faint and fading cologne of cultural cringe. This will be served up with the sort of witty banter that we all aspire to but never quite pull off in real life, and a thick sauce of awkwardly showy quotes that even the most well-stocked gazofilacio will trip on. [Read more…]

Emily Brookes

Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2016), 376 pp., $30

A few months ago, after nearly a decade overseas, my husband and I began preparing to bring our young family back to Wellington. But where in Wellington? You have Mt Victoria, with its Art Nouveau architecture and well-heeled populace; the sleepy seaside-village vibe of Island Bay; Kelburn and Northland and Karori, winding with a deceptive laziness up the hillside; you have the southern bays, houses teetering precariously on ragged and exposed cliff faces, all the better to catch the walloping force of a southerly storm.

It’s a big decision made all the more difficult by the space of nine years and the curious feeling of being a visitor in one’s own city, that despite a close familiarity we don’t really know it at all.

Interesting timing, then, that in the midst of this process, Danyl McLauchlan’s Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley, which plants a sinister underbelly in the most unlikely of Wellington settings, should happen upon my desk.  [Read more…]