All week this week we recommend the very best, A-grade quality, guaranteed good books for Christmas. Today: Holly Walker reviews Commonwealth, a stunning novel by Ann Patchett. It creeps up on you, this novel. It opens in 1964, at a christening party in suburban Los Angeles. Bert Cousins shows up uninvited with a big bottle of gin. The … Read more
Xmas is around the corner! By all means choose something from the latest Unity Books best-seller chart at their stores in Auckland and Wellington. AUCKLAND STORE 1 Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton, $37) by Zadie Smith “A keen, controlled novel about dance and blackness steps onto a stage of cultural land mines…Moving, funny, and grave, this novel … Read more
Ashleigh Young resolves the burning issue facing all New Zealanders: the correct way to spell our beloved national particle. Hint: it’s not “aye”. On Tuesday this week, I decided to do a tweet about eh. I decided it because at Victoria University Press, where I work, a situation had arisen where an author wanted to … Read more
New apocalyptic verse by Wellington writer Nick Ascroft. Gone Mad Health and safety gone mad. Disease and hazard gone mad. ‘Health and safety gone mad’ gone mad. Healthy dislike of Baby Boomers gone mad. Housing prices gone mad. Interest rates threatening to spiral out of control but remaining at a plateau gone mad. Estate agents gone mad. I’m … Read more
“I need to be extraordinary,” said English writer Angela Carter, and her biography attests that she got her wish. Marion McLeod reviews the life story of a woman who described her anorexia as “attempted suicide by narcissism”. AS Byatt recalls first meeting Angela Carter in 1969. “A very disagreeable woman stomped up to me, and said, … Read more
New Zealand literature! What is it, who reads it, and why does it exist? Some or none or all of these questions are about to be answered in the first annual Spinoff Review of Books literary awards!!! Some say 2016 will go down in history as the year between 2015 and 2017, but it’s too early … Read more
Chelsea Winter! Force of nature, success story, brand. But can she, you know, cook? Food writer Delaney Mes does her best to persevere with the recipes and the puns in the new cookbook Scrumptious. It’s been four years since Chelsea Winter tearily made her way into New Zealand cooking show history when she was crowned the winner of the late, … Read more
The return of Catherine Chidgey has been greeted as a literary event, but her fruity, humourless prose fails to impress Jane Westaway. From time to time a reviewer strikes a novel whose external circumstances threaten to disrupt the intimate relationship between the reader and the fiction. The Wish Child – Catherine Chidgey’s first novel in … Read more
The weekly Unity Books best-seller chart at their stores in Wellington and Auckland. WELLINGTON STORE 1 Wellington In Your Pocket (Fitzbeck Creative, $25) by Nigel Beckford & Michael Fitzsimons, illustrated by Karolina Slovakova Handy and handsome guide to cool places to go in Wellington. 2 Havana Coffee Works (Phantom House, $50) by Geoff Marsland & … Read more
Dunedin writer Alan Roddick may hold the New Zealand record as the author who has had the longest period between two books. A new collection of verse was published in September; it follows his debut collection, published in 1967…The two Friday poems are taken from his 2016 book, Getting It Right. Lost and Found … Read more
Steve Braunias conducts the live email interview – the revolutionary journalistic practise trailblazed exclusively by the Spinoff Review of Books – with journalist and author Adam Dudding. Feature image credit: Noah Ferguson-Dudding. Adam Dudding is a feature journalist with the Sunday Star-Times, and his first book My Father’s Island was longlisted on Tuesday morning for … Read more
Philip Matthews reviews CK Stead’s new short story collection, which has been longlisted for the 2017 Ockham national book awards. To review CK Stead is to negotiate personal and political minefields. Let’s cover the personal first. Every reviewer of Stead worries that they might be poking a bear with a stick and cautiously expects a … Read more
Everyone said The Sellout, winner of the Man Booker prize, was “satire”. Everyone except the author – and Spinoff reviewer Charlotte Graham. “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man,” begins the 2016 Man Booker prize-winning novel The Sellout, “But I’ve never stolen anything.” The urge to giggle awkwardly at this line is acknowledged … Read more
Announcing the longlist of the 2017 Ockham national book awards. Right then. Last night we set the switch for 5:01am, to get in first and fastest with the 2017 Ockham national book awards longlist, embargoed till 5:00am. There are some stunning inclusions, mystifying omissions, and a leading publisher has already attacked the judges of one … Read more
Steve Braunias finally gets around to writing about the event he got sent to cover by Wellington Tourism – LitCrawl, which kind of got overshadowed by this thing that happened on a Sunday night. I was all set to write about Wellington’s very lively and audaciously staged LitCrawl live-event literary extravaganza last Monday, but the … Read more
The weekly best-seller chart at Unity stores in Auckland and Wellington, for the week just ended: November 18 AUCKLAND STORE 1 The Shops (Luncheon Sausage Books, $40) by Steve Braunias and Peter Black It’s not really about shops at all, it’s actually an evocation of the profound melancholy and unexpected beauty of ordinary New Zealand … Read more
New verse by writer and singer, Dominic Hoey. Toast I’d like to make a toast to the sound man for making me louder than my detractors to the bar tenders, those unsung heroes of hospo, serving up sweet amnesia to the hecklers, the physical manifestation of the voices in my head, shut -the fuck- … Read more
Brian Turner wades through the hyperbole in Brendon McCullum’s biography, and recalls the old saying: “Self-praise is no recommendation.” On the front flap of the cover of Declared, the blurbist trumpets Brendon McCullum “could reduce the world’s bowling elite to quivering wrecks”, and “As a captain… his influence has been so profound it will likely change the way … Read more
There are good, standard, engaged reviews; but every once in a while, like never, or just this once, a reviewer (name of Harry Ricketts; Wellington academic, poet, distinguished man of letters) comes along and writes a book review which is beyond meta and just kind of far-out, also brilliant. Spring rain The reviewer was excited when … Read more
The weekly best-seller chart at Unity stores in Auckland and Wellington, for the week just ended: November 11 WELLINGTON STORE 1 Sellout: A Novel (Oneworld, $28) by Paul Beattie A review copy of the Man Booker award-winning dark satire on American life was despatched to Charlotte Graham on Monday, and she emailed on Wednesday morning to … Read more
New verse by writer Amanda Kennedy. Write about your father’s father At school, the task today is write about your father’s father. You find it slightly hard to breathe as people at your table tell their stories I mean, if you have ever read School Journals, You will know that grandads aren’t supposed to … Read more
Love gone bad, new love, the Māori way of life, and a Pakeha book about life on the marae: Talia Marshall makes the connections. February – Kua Mutu Funny, after such a bright start, how despondent and lonely our love had become, but we tried to repair things by going on a holiday late in … Read more
An essay by Brannavan Gnanalingam about subtle racism in New Zealand literature. While Lionel Shriver recently caused a bit of a stink saying that fiction writers could put on a sombrero whenever they wanted, contemporary New Zealand writers appear to be terrified of entering into a sombrero shop in the first place. We’ll happily spend … Read more
A personal essay by veteran journalist Chris Barton on what it’s like to be made redundant by the Herald – and his fears for any kind of intelligent, long-form writing in mainstream media. When the end came, in December 2012, it was brutal. I was called to a meeting in an editor’s office. It was immediately clear that, to … Read more
The weekly best-seller chart at Unity stores in Auckland and Wellington, for the week just ended: November 4 AUCKLAND STORE 1 City House, Country House (Godwit, 485) by John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds City houses, country houses. 2 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harvill Secker, $40) by Yuval Noah Secker “The old trope … Read more
New verse by Auckland writer Amanda Kennedy. When Lorelai broke the curtain rail I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my sister When Lorelai broke the curtain rail. She ran in to announce her crime, trailed off behind her mother to the scene awaiting sentencing, her husky little voice going sorry, sorry, … Read more
Good news for four New Zealand writers, as exclusively revealed by the Spinoff Review of Books. Yeah, yeah, so the Man Booker prize was announced last week and some guy won it, but who cares bro! His book looks stink. It is with excitement that the Spinoff Review of Books can exclusively reveal that this … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews a new biography of the great novelist Beryl Bainbridge – which reveals that she wrote an unpublished manuscript inspired by the Parker-Hulme murder in Christchurch. This is the first full-length biography of Beryl Bainbridge, the brilliant Liverpudlian novelist, born a decade before the Beatles, died 2010. I’m leaving the birth date vague: … Read more
A personal essay by author Helen McNeil about one of New Zealand’s most put-down towns – Kawerau. Kawerau is my hometown. My family arrived there as “ten pound Poms” in 1956 when I was four years old. My dad worked shift at the Mill and kept saying how lucky we were to be living in … Read more