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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

From the Motley of Unscripted Life

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Philip Temple

Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall (Vintage, 2022), 304pp, $36

These stories are like the objets d’art that you find in a gallery in the Whitestone Quarter of Oamaru. They are various, small and large, arranged in good order on tables above old wooden floorboards that once supported bales of wool and the tread of nailed boots. Provincial, well crafted, mostly from the hands of the gallery owner who follows you around and explains what is particular about this and that. Which can be annoying so that, in the end, you are not sure what to buy or leave behind. [Read more…]

Filed Under: short stories

Short Stories, Big Pictures

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Iona Winter

Beats of the Pa’u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 152pp, $30; Peninsula by Sharron Came (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 256pp, $30

Maria Samuela, of Cook Islands descent, has an MA from the IIML, and her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. Beats of the Pa’u is her debut collection, told via a community of first and second generation Cook Islands New Zealanders, from the 1950s through to the present day. 

From start to finish, Beats of the Pa’u provides multiple points of view within its stories, often correlating in central themes, such as grief, immigration, and love. The clever use of shifting focus between protagonists also links us to another generation’s experiential history. With apparent ease, these stories straddle worlds of religion, shame, compliance, tradition, and how younger generations often strive to embrace alternate identities. Samuela excels at showing lived experience and, with an intimate knowledge of her culture underpinning each story, she draws us in whilst also evoking compassion and laughter. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

Six of the Best

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Charlotte Grimshaw

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand’s best writers, ed. Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2021), 560pp, $40

One day recently, when we were in the middle of a discussion about the current pandemic, perhaps the Delta surge we’d just overcome in Auckland or the projected peak of the Omicron wave, my mother’s expression turned glazed and distant and she began to describe another pandemic in another time: the polio outbreak in her childhood that closed the schools, setting her and her sisters and friends free to roam and run wild for a whole summer. And it was, she said, now she remembered it, an exceptionally long, hot summer like the drought in Auckland in 2020 and 2021, when the parks turned brown, the streams dried up, the skies every day were cloudless blue, and for her, back then, there was nothing to be done but swim and bike for miles and dream your way through another day, a gang of kids liberated from the world of school and clocks and teachers and parents, just for a time. The adults must have been fearful (infantile paralysis, the horrifying threat of the ‘iron lung’: what could be more terrifying for a parent?) but she remembered it as dreamy, idyllic, timeless, mercifully free from the tyranny of phones and computers and Zoom. No Google school, no remote learning; you could read a book under a tree, and other than that, some lessons might arrive in the mail every now and then. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

If These Walls Could Talk

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: short stories

Standing Strong

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: anthology, maori and pacific, memoir, poetry, short stories

The Outrageous and the Everyday

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

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