Wendy Parkins

Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, 2022), 269pp, $35

‘When I was very small, I loved wolves, she told me.’ The broadcaster Noelle McCarthy begins her memoir with a recollection of early childhood that alludes to an almost fairy-tale world. But look again at that deceptively simple opening sentence: ‘When I was very small, I loved wolves, she told me.’ From the beginning, the past is mediated through the mother. She is the one who—for good or ill—first tells our story, tells us who we are. Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter presents a moving story of beginnings and endings, frankly detailing a childhood damaged by a mother’s alcoholism and McCarthy’s own journey of recovery from the same addiction.  [Read more…]

Kerry Lane

Come Back to Mona Vale: Life and death in a Christchurch mansion, by Alexander McKinnon (Otago University Press, 2021), 335pp, $40 

In film, one of the most effective ways to build tension is to frame a shot around something that is not there. In a two-shot with only one person, the eye is drawn relentlessly to the yawning space next to them, which cries out for balance. The root of horror is in this absence, in the certainty that there should be something with no further explanation. The more developed the structure in which the absence is embedded, the more viscerally it will be felt. 

Come Back to Mona Vale is a story about absence, told in absences. It is the first book by Alexander McKinnon, winner of the 2020 Landfall essay competition. The book relates the author’s journey to assemble a narrative of his own family, beginning with his great-grandfather, the last private owner of the Christchurch estate Mona Vale. Written over seven years, it charts the author’s exploration of his mother’s family history, from the legal and financial complexities left behind by his great-grandfather, to the personal lives of multiple generations now dead. [Read more…]

Robert McLean

Towards Compostela: Walking the Camino de Santiago by Catharina van Bohemen (The Cuba Press, 2020), pp., $38; Prague in My Bones by Jindra Tichy (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 344pp., $45

Travel books work best for me when the narrator, the reader’s guide or travel companion, is the kind of personality with whom one would like to travel in the real. Robert Byron, through whose Road to Oxiana I have wandered many times in the company of its wry, bewildered, self-deprecating author, is one such fellow traveller. A strain of empathy deriving from mutual misunderstanding—a generous and good-humoured accommodation of difference—is the hallmark of Byron’s encounters with people of all stripes, often in the most discommodious locales. So, too, one never gets the sense that he is appropriative or selective in his passages through Elsewhere; rather, he is at once discerning and appreciative. And what I need from a travel companion I need from a literary one, too. [Read more…]

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Jacinta Ruru

From the Centre: A writer’s life by Patricia Grace (Penguin, 2021), 304pp, $40

I knew I would adore this book even before I first held it. I am not an impartial reviewer. Patricia Grace has loomed large in my life since my high school English teacher first shared some of Grace’s writing with us. This was my lightbulb moment growing up. It was the first time I had read Māori stories about Māori families, and they motivated me to learn more about the resilience of Māori in the face of colonisation and racism. [Read more…]