Barbara Brookes on My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton
The workings of memory
Denis Harold on Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee
How to ease the realm of pain?
Gerry Te Kapa Coates on Ko Taranaki te Maunga by Rachel Buchanan
Is it me or is it us?
Susan Wardell on Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an age of loneliness by Jenny Robin Jones
Elemental Awareness
Laurence Fearnley Dark Forest, Deep Sea: Reflections of a hunter by Richard Hall (Submarine, 2017), 250 pp., $38; Oxygen by William Trubridge (HarperCollins, 2017) 336 pp., $39.99 Every now and again you open a book, begin reading and relax as you realise that you have found the perfect fit for your mood. This is what […]
Burning Ambition
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 […]
The Fool’s Gold of Family Myth
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 […]
Something in the Cells that Can’t Be Unlearned
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 […]
Embracing Complexity
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 […]
The Interrogation of Memory
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 […]
A Comfy Sofa, a Kōrero, a Very Fine Quilt
Fiona Samuel These Two Hands by Renée (Mākaro Press, 2017) 416 pp., $38 How perfectly form and content marry in this warm, sturdy, enveloping and deeply personal memoir by Renée. Choosing a quilt as her structural guide, Renée tells the story of her life in 88 ‘patches’, one for every year lived. Freed from the […]
Bodies Lost and Found
Johanna Emeney The Walking Stick Tree by Trish Harris (Escalator Press, 2016), 234 pp., $35; The Case of the Missing Body by Jenny Powell (Otago University Press, 2016), 100 pp., $29.25 Trish Harris’ The Walking Stick Tree is the story of the author’s life with pain. The reader follows her progress over some 47 years, […]
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