New Zealand books in review
Rebecca Styles
Tinderbox by Megan Dunn (Galley Press, 2017), 151 pp., $30
Tinderbox (2017) by Megan Dunn is a narrative about writing – about the writer we want to be coming up against the writer we are. About the ideas we think will come to fruition coming up against the realities of copyright and the commodification of literature. It’s about the time it takes to write and formulate ideas amongst the stuff of life. [Read more…]
Barbara Else
Dear Oliver: Uncovering a Pākehā history by Peter Wells (Massey University Press, 2018), 336 pp., $39.99
Peter Wells – novelist, film director, historian, co-founder of the Auckland Writers Festival – uses his life story as a lens to track through several generations of his family. His memoir is book-ended by a new young life, Oliver, and the death of Wells’ mother Bess. Clear-eyed about his family background of English immigrants to New Zealand in the nineteenth century, Wells also examines the sources of his creativity. [Read more…]
Helen Watson White
Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press, 2017), 288 pp., $45
‘I was always looking for my father, even when he was still there,’ writes Diana Wichtel of her Polish-born father, Benjamin Wichtel (on his first gravestone, ‘Witchell’). This father’s absence from his daughter’s life is, however, only the tip of the iceberg that is his once-numerous Warsaw family’s accumulated grief and loss after the ravages of the Holocaust. Driving to Treblinka maps Wichtel’s life-long ‘search for a lost father’, and makes the process of searching both a framework for and a part of her subject. [Read more…]
Alison Wong
You Do Not Travel in China at the Full Moon: Agnes Moncrieff’s letters from China 1930–1945 edited by Barbara Francis (Victoria University Press, 2017), 295 pp., $50; Old Asian, New Asian by K. Emma Ng (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 104 pp., $14.99
When we consider New Zealanders who have lived in China and had a significant impact on that country and/or on our literary or cultural imagination, we easily call to mind Rewi Alley, Robin Hyde and James Bertram. But many others went to China as missionaries, medical or humanitarian workers, including Kathleen Hall, Mary Moore, Alexander Don, George McNeur, Annie James, Dr Kathleen Pih and Agnes Moncrieff. [Read more…]
Holly Walker
Casting Off by Elspeth Sandys (Otago University Press, 2017), 224 pp., $35
Elspeth Sandys has had many names. Born Frances Hilton James in 1948, she became Elspeth Sandilands Somerville on the occasion of her adoption into the prominent Dunedin Somerville clan at the age of nine months. The circumstances of her birth and adoption, and their impact on her childhood, were the subject of the first volume of her memoir, What Lies Beneath, published in 2014. [Read more…]