Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

If These Walls Could Talk

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Sally Blundell

Home Theatre by Anthony Lapwood (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 240 pp, $30

In the thirteen short stories that make up Home Theatre by Wellington writer Anthony Lapwood, the walls of the cold, rat- and ant-infested Repertory Apartments really do talk. Over time and genre, the overlapping lives of the residents in this former theatre turned radio factory turned apartment block tell stories of hurt and hope, marriage breakups, anxious parents, close friendships, straitened circumstances, and glitches in the imperfect art of time travel. Like a slow drive-by in an Edward Hopper painting, Lapwood catches glimpses of his characters’ lives through windows, tracing the backstories of those who call this dingy, recognisably Wellington block of flats home. The result is a beautifully crafted and empathetic debut collection. [Read more…]

Standing Strong

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

Tina Shaw

Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu women’s anthology, edited by Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (Victoria University Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

If ever one has viewed Vanuatu as an idyllic paradise where life is easy, Sista, Stanap Strong! will soon dispel the myth. This anthology of writing by Vanuatu women—the first of its kind—shines a light on women’s lives in the archipelago. In poems, non-fiction pieces, stories and song, themes emerge of violence towards women, a misogynistic and patriarchal society, colonialism, the importance of education, and concern for the kind of world children will one day inherit. [Read more…]

The Outrageous and the Everyday

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Kerry Lane

The Pink Jumpsuit: Short fictions, tall truths by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 134pp, $35 

The Pink Jumpsuit is the latest book by Emma Neale, one of the best-known writers working in Aotearoa today. Neale’s previous work includes six novels and six collections of poetry, and too many awards and honours to list here. Her flash and short fiction has also been widely published and acclaimed, but this is the first time these small pieces—short fictions and tall truths, as the subtitle describes them—have been gathered into a collection.  [Read more…]

Between the Long and the Short of It

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Sally Blundell 

Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Craig Gamble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 478pp, $35

‘Maybe I could sew my legs together,’ Loretta muses, wishing for a tail. Penned-on lines or her own rashy, eczematic skin could pass for scales. Sniffing, dripping, allergy-ridden Jeremy is a likely candidate for the required slimy hagfish; a sickening Mrs Wilberforce (a nod to Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain) is Loretta’s longed-for mermaid kindred spirit. This is the alarming, yet vividly drawn cast of ‘Scales, Tails and Hagfish’, Octavia Cade’s story of an insistent, angry, self-proclaimed mermaid that sets the pace for this collection of fourteen long short stories with unflagging brio.  [Read more…]

At the Edge of Storytelling

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Vaughan Rapatahana

I Wish, I Wish by Zirk van den Berg (Cuba Press Novella Series, 2020), 173pp, $25; Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson, and other very short stories by Jack Remiel Cottrell (Canterbury University Press, 2021), 136pp, $29.99

Two interesting and arresting books. The first is a short novel, a work of fantastic fiction; the second is a series of short, short genre-benders, a work of sometimes frightening fabulousness. Both are very well written, compact in construction and content, and compelling.

I Wish, I Wish is a cleverly written novella which is bodacious reading—swift to complete, simple to solve. The kaupapa or theme is rather unusual. A nondescript nonentity of an undertaker, Seb, earns himself three wishes because of his own kind act towards a fading yet angelic child, Gabriel, who visits the bankrupting mortuary where Seb performs the brunt of the work, and who somewhat miraculously reconstructs a seemingly unsalvageable Rubik’s Cube. [Read more…]

Variations on a Theme

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Wendy Parkins

The Piano Girls by Elizabeth Smither (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 246pp, $35

Elizabeth Smither’s collection of short stories, The Piano Girls, is the latest addition to a list of publications any writer might envy that includes six novels and eighteen collections of poetry, as well as glittering prizes like the 2002 Te Mata Poet Laureate, the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008 and the Ockham’s Poetry Award in 2018. This collection suggests that Smither is not done yet. Its twenty stories examine the lives of girls and women, from adolescent angst and ambition to the renegotiations and relinquishments of later life. [Read more…]