A new poem by Tauranga poet Marcel Currin. Riding home from work I’d been dreaming about the soft edges of the road. It was a radio dream. The voices were upside down. Something on the ground was interesting to them. Later I was awake. I don’t know when. My eyes were loaded with fog. … Read more
Yep, there’s a book of the TV show and yep, it’s just as wonderful. In this extract, funeral director Francis Tipene explains why you don’t need to splurge on send-offs, how he keeps his act together – and why he cringes when people talk about ‘closure’. Funerals don’t need to be expensive. People can choose … Read more
Fresh off another Ockhams nomination, here’s one of New Zealand’s foremost historians on the realities of research – and the end of a golden era at our national archive. It felt like I had finally reached the inner sanctum of New Zealand historians. In January 1993 I arrived in Wellington on a three-month contract researching … Read more
Librarian Rebecca Hastie with a crash course on the fraught task of “weeding”, the systematic removal of resources from a library collection. Writer and reviewer David Larsen wrote an article the other week conveying his immense displeasure and concern that the National Library is removing 600,000 books from its collection. David’s piece, along with the … Read more
JP Pomare is a Kiwi living in Melbourne, and a stingingly great writer. His new thriller In the Clearing is set in the Australian bush, with fire forever licking the horizon. We asked him to tell us about the view from over there. 1 Notes on burning When my family read my new novel In The … Read more
What’s the best way to get adults reading? Get them reading when they’re children – and there’s no better place to start than the Unity Children’s Bestseller Chart. AUCKLAND 1 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Amulet Books, $30, 8+) Briar at Little Unity writes: so this is the movie tie-in hardback edition, but it’s … Read more
Brannavan Gnanalingam reads Rose Lu’s groundbreaking essay collection – overlooked by the Ockhams judges – and finds it full of elevating yarns that make him feel seen. The question many non-white people dread is, “where are you from?” The question is loaded – obviously, people have noticed your skin colour as different from the outset. … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20) Time travel done incredibly badly, by some accounts, and impeccably … Read more
At 5am this morning, like a dawn chorus, the embargo lifted on the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist. Here are the 40 books that made it, followed by some frank thoughts from our books editor, Catherine Woulfe. ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press) Lonely Asian Woman by … Read more
‘I finished This is Pleasure at about 4am on a Sunday. I hadn’t been able to sleep – I’d had an uncomfortable interaction with a powerful person, and it was keeping me awake …’. Pip Adam on a book that challenged and changed her. From where I’m typing this, I can see a copy of … Read more
Scarlett Cayford stumbles, ravenous, into a glorious new world. I go through phases with my reading, like any bibliophile. Sometimes my life can barely keep pace with my reading, and I find myself wedging pages of books into my calendar wherever I can: in waiting rooms and on bus seats and in the first five … Read more
A new fantasy series by Isa Pearl Ritchie focuses on a girl who struggles with anxiety and panic attacks. Here, Ritchie explains how her own childhood sparked Awa and the Dreamrealm. I was confused a lot of the way through my schooling. I would zone out a lot in class and I struggled to pay … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay (Picador, $23) Legit funny. 2 Girl, Woman, … Read more
A new poem by Palmerston North poet Katrina Upperton. Howl I Buy the biggest jacket you can find and let your synapses back up till the machine fails, pick at your sparking fingers. Check out that Robocop radiator: the wiring is something you would not believe. C’mon, man, think: you’ll never get the … Read more
Petra Molloy was born in the Netherlands and moved to Aotearoa with her family in 1952; she lives in Auckland. Her novel Chosen Boys is about child abuse in the Catholic Church. It’s set in dawn-raids South Auckland – and is written largely from the point of view of a Samoan mother. We asked Molloy … Read more
The National Library says it is ‘making room for more New Zealand and Pacific stories’ and hopes the books it’s purging might ‘spark joy’ for other people. David Larsen considers it a whacking great clear-cutting. It would be irresponsible for me to tell you the National Library is about to burn six hundred thousand of … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23) WTAF Auckland 2 The Truants by Kate Weinberg (Bloomsbury, $33) Agatha Christie + … Read more
A new poem by Kirikiriroa poet essa may ranapiri. Kae and the Tohorā did u think of the taste of his blubber even as u sat upon his great mammal form ? think of unmasking the slip of his great flippers that churn the salt troth of the sea … Read more
Crime week: Chris Cessford welcomes a sumptuous crime story starring a ‘rule-breaking badass in a sari’. Sujata Massey kicks off the decade with the first book in a fresh new crime series – the historical, award-winning whodunnit A Murder at Malabar Hill. She introduces Perveen Mistry, in 1921 Bombay’s only woman lawyer and an amateur … Read more
Crime week: In 1931, 17 year-old Phyllis Avis Symons was buried alive by her partner in the fill from construction of Mount Victoria Tunnel. The man who killed her was hanged. The case was a sensation, and is the focus of Andi C. Buchanan’s new novel, extracted here. You know how the story will go, … Read more
Crime Week: One’s a charismatic Māori cop who gave us the word “cunthooks”. The other’s a Vietnam vet turned maverick LA detective. Ngaio Marsh Awards judge Stephanie Jones on why she loves them both. On a recent Saturday evening, the author Michael Connelly sat inscrutable on a stage at AUT while a devoted reader (front … Read more
Auē author Becky Manawatu picks holes in her mahi and then starts to sew them up again, in this essay about colonialism and tikanga and the smoke in the sky. A wise woman once tweeted to me that “explaining is losing”, yet here I am. Explaining. Because when the world is on fire, we’re losing … Read more
A new poem by Wellington writer Laura Vincent. Anecdotal happiness There was a story on the six o’clock news “Scientists have discovered that only bad things are happening now It seems nothing good will happen on a grand scale ever again” In their carefully region-free accent the newsreader continued: “Experts are still working … Read more
They are the clowns who shall inherit the earth – and for Trump, Johnson, Morrison et al, the jokester act provides the perfect political cover, writes Morgan Godfery. (This essay is extracted from new essay collection Public Knowledge: Radical Futures and is heavily abridged. Godfery goes on to argue for a revolution by degrees, beginning … Read more
Alie Benge on the book that built a shimmering private world for her and her sisters. I own two copies of Little Women. One is bound in white leather, has gilt edges, a gold filigree pattern on the front, and the heft of a family Bible. Each copy of this edition is made to order. … Read more
Summer reissue: Three Women is a fervent, scrupulous qualitative review of female desire. It’s also a lesson in commitment – and the powerful act of paying attention. First published 8 July, 2019. Imagine a pole vaulter strolling into the Olympics, eyeing the bar – the women’s world record is 5.06m – and casually hitching it like … Read more
Summer reissue: Tired of his tropes and infatuations, Michelle Langstone writes about her waning love for the writings of Japanese author Haruki Murakami. First published 29 July 2019. I left you behind with a note that said “Free to a good home. No longer wanted.” Blunt, perhaps, but that’s how it is when love runs … Read more
A new poem by Sydney poet Catherine Vidler. apart from pink sun, sun pink from apart apart from pink sun, apart from all-dying grass, cloud-fuzz, brown-tinged, stretched virtual-zero, stones exposed, thirsty cracks, dry fountains, domestic courtyards aghast, this mix, dirty, dirtier, despair worn sharp-casual, this peculiar view, eerie light-lurking, apricot shapes … Read more
Huge claims from Uther Dean about The Wicked + The Divine, the books he’s spent the last five years with. The Wicked + The Divine is the best story released this decade in any medium. I want to be clear here. People often confuse favourite for best when talking critically. I am not saying that … Read more