Louisa Kasza celebrates the arrival of a “terrifying talent” – Annaleese Jochems, the young author of a novel about an Auckland princess who falls in lust with a gorgeous woman fitness instructor. Baby, the debut novel from the rudely 23-year-old Annaleese Jochems, signals the arrival of a terrifying talent. It exists in the world of … Read more
Holly Walker reviews a moody, gothic novel set in the brooding countryside of the Wairarapa. There’s something about the Wairarapa. Big skies. Beautiful old villas. Close-knit communities, with a pointy edge of small town meanness. There’s also something about the dying days of 1999, that strange, tense moment before we ticked over into the 21st … Read more
Charlotte Grimshaw reviews A Strange Beautiful Excitement, Redmer Yska’s superb telling of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood and teenage years in Wellington. Samuel Revans, who died in 1888, the year Katherine Mansfield was born, was an enthusiastic promoter for the New Zealand Company. His handbills were distributed in London and went in for a fantastic degree of license, … Read more
All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books examines A Moral Truth, an important new book about investigative journalism in New Zealand. Today: the book is reviewed by John Campbell. In August, 1903, the New Zealand Herald published a series of articles by Hilda Rollett on “the slums of Auckland”. Greedy landlords, overcrowding, “diseases … Read more
Neil Young reviews the diaries of everybody’s favourite memoirist, David Sedaris. In one of my favourite books, A Little History of the World, the author Ernst Gombrich compares our experience of the past to a scrap of burning paper falling down a bottomless well. The burning paper falls and briefly lights up the sides of … Read more
Andra Jenkin reviews The Power, a wildly successful feminist sci-fi novel which imagines a world where women are in control. Naomi Alderman’s The Power is speculative fiction set in a future and based on the fascinating premise that women are suddenly able to inflict pain and death at will. This is the power of the … Read more
Charlotte Graham reviews the ‘horrifying’ new memoir by Roxane Gay. Content warning: this article discusses sexual assault and eating disorders, which may be distressing for sufferers and survivors. When Roxane Gay was 12 years old she rode her bike into the woods with a boy she was dating, and he and his friends took turns raping her. … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best bookstores in the galaxy. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $38) “A hotchpotch rather than a patchwork, a jigsaw with many missing pieces…It teems with anecdote but there is very little dialogue. Instead, Roy builds this story of contemporary India with … Read more
Marion McLeod is baffled and somewhat bored to sobs by the eagerly awaited second novel by Indian superstar novelist Arundhati Roy. It’s 20 years since Arundhati Roy published her first novel, The God of Small Things, and won the Booker. She was the first Indian actually resident in India to do so. A few months … Read more
What the hell is Sarah Quigley playing at in her novel about three mentally ill young people on the brink of suicide, wonders Holly Walker. Last week’s “Break the Silence” series by Olivia Carville in the New Zealand Herald was intended to start a national conversation about youth suicide. Are we not already having that … Read more
New Zealand career diplomat Gerald McGhie witnessed the fall of Gorbachev and the rise of Yeltsin when he served as our ambassador to Russia – but seems to have seen nuzzink, writes reviewer Tony Simpson. I have encountered quite a number of New Zealand foreign service staff, some at quite senior levels in my own … Read more
To celebrate 25 years of making music together, former child band Hanson played a single concert at Auckland Town Hall. Madeleine Chapman went along with a stranger she met while eating dinner. Despite my outsized confidence in the reliability of my friends and family, on Tuesday night I found myself eating at Nando’s, about to … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Sam Brooks reviews the West Side Story touring blockbuster spectacle. I consider myself a big fan of musicals. I listen to them more than your average homosexual, I try and see a few every year, and I wish I … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews an ‘icy-cold’ account of a Scottish serial killer by the brilliant Denise Mina. Scottish writer Denise Mina has been dubbed Glasgow’s answer to Edinburgh’s Ian Rankin. Having written a dozen crime novels, several plays and films, a comic (Hellblazer) and three graphic novels (adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy), she has decided to … Read more
Music memoirs are so hot right now. Philip Matthews reads one of the best new books of the bunch – a hilarious account by Will Carruthers of Spacemen 3, a “drug parakeet” who ended up digging trenches. Do you feel like there is a boom in music memoir writing right now? Long may it run. Locally, Nick Bollinger’s … Read more
We conclude our week-long series on the new memoir by former Green MP Holly Walker with a review by another ex-MP – Deborah Coddington. Who would have thought Holly Walker, mother and Green MP from 2011 to 2014, was a victim of violent abuse while she was in Parliament? Her face was so badly bruised … Read more
Sam Brooks reviews If There’s No Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming and Power Ballad, two plays by rising star dramturgist Julia Croft on now at The Basement. Winter brings us many things. It’s the weather for holding your hot water bottle tight, for drinking coffee for warmth as well as staying awake and … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Madeleine Chapman makes a pilgrimage to the frenzy-sparking new Kmart in the Hutt. The staff at the newly opened Kmart in Petone wave green pool noodles in the air to signal an available checkout. It’s funny, it’s genius, and it’s exactly … Read more
Louisa Kasza reviews the full-on memoir by former beauty editor and fulltime drug addict Cat Marnell. Charming, strung-out ex-beauty editor Cat Marnell represents many things traditionally despised about that walking thinkpiece, the millennial. Born into privilege, Marnell recognises her own potential as a writer, preferably for Condé Nast magazines, and merrily sets forth into a … Read more
Eat Me, a new study of the history and science of cannibalism, squanders the opportunity to present new insights, writes Paul Moon. Cannibalism is at once disturbing and banal. It’s disturbing because acts of cannibalism historically have generally been preceded by killings. Cannibalism is also often depicted as occurring in episodes of extreme violence, and … Read more
“Horrifying and hopeful at the same time”: Kim Hill reviews Idaho, one of the most acclaimed novels of 2017. A couple of years ago, I was visiting my father’s side of the family in Northern Ireland. As a shy, unhappy English child, I would spend holidays with them. I found them exotic, intimidating, irresistibly attractive. … Read more
“I know it may appear mean-spirited,” says Deborah Hill-Cone, “to write a bad review about anyone who has the courage to speak publicly about their mental illness.” And then she proceeds to write the bad review. Sarah Wilson writes in First We Make the Beast Beautiful, “I’d spent my life agile and I arrogantly traded … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Simon Wilson orbits a State Highway One showpiece. Ah, the Waikato, where NZTA sends its maddest roading engineers to do their worst. Which they certainly do: absurdly over-engineered exchanges at Te Kauwhata and Rangiriri, giant new motorways leading in and … Read more
Comedy co-editor Sam Brooks reviews the two recipients of the Creative Comedy Project Grant – Laura Daniel and Joseph Moore’s Two Hearts and Sarah Harpur’s Dead Dad’s Club – and awards our third Spinoff Comedy Badge of Honour. Laura Daniel x Joseph Moore: Two Hearts We’re halfway through the festival, I’ve seen about twenty-five shows, and I’m going to call it: Two … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the latest novel by the prolific Damien Wilkins. Note: the headline was her idea. Any Wellingtonian reading Lifting has to work hard not to see Cutty’s as Kirkcaldie and Stains. Well, it is, isn’t it? A large department store in Wellington, with a piano, and a top-hatted doorman, going through hard … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Madeleine Chapman caught the latest musical in town with the longest name. When I was younger, I watched a DVD of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat almost every day during one school holidays. And in all those viewings, … Read more
Feminist writer Roxane Gay explores the female condition in her new collection of short stories. Some critics have loathed the depiction of women characters who welcome violence; reviewer Holly Walker takes another approach. Roxane Gay is good at opening sentences. Examples from her first short story collection, Difficult Women: “The stone thrower lives in a glass house … Read more
An essay by Finlay Macdonald on a typically brilliant and impossible to categorise work of biographical art by the late James McNeish. A journalist friend of mine once fell foul of the establishment so badly that he was forced to leave the country. It was an unhappy time, and he later suggested he’d like to … Read more
We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: Madeleine Chapman reveals where to find the best chocolate hot cross bun in New Zealand. Karori is pretty bad. I lived there from birth until I went off to university and I loved every moment of it, but it’s … Read more