Talia Marshall reviews what is likely the year’s most entertaining, readable, and popular New Zealand novel, Daylight Second by Kelly Ana Morey. I remember the Phar Lap skeleton at the old Dominion Museum off Buckle St in Wellington. He was in a glass case just after the Victorian settlers listless in their life-sized dioramas, and … Read more
Margo White reviews the greatest novel ever written from the point of view of an opinionated and somewhat pompous foetus – Nutshell, by Ian McEwan. We might as well start with the novel’s memorable opening sentence: “So here I am, upside down in a woman.” Ian McEwan has said the sentence came to him when … Read more
James Robins reviews the new novel by funnyman Matt Suddain. John Tamberlain, the hero and narrator of Matt Suddain’s second novel Hunters & Collectors, is a successful critic. This is the first sign that we’re dealing with a wild imagination. As if to push the fold even further, we find that Tamberlain is in demand, … Read more
Roy Colbert reviews Women of the Catlins: Life In The Deep South Women have always done it hard in the Catlins, a, I was going to say a remote and difficult area on the South Island’s south-east coast, but the people who live there would have none of that. For townies, it would be remote, harsh, … Read more
Peter Wells reviews Our Young Man by Edmund White. Can an author write too much? A glance down the inside page of Edmund White’s new novel discloses either a staggering productivity (13 novels, six works of nonfiction, three biographies and four memoirs) or an author’s unstoppable urge to create. His seminal A Boy’s Own Story … Read more
There are some lovely lucid moments in Fiona Kidman’s latest novel, says Charlotte Graham, and it’s a reminder that “you’re reading a boss”. If only the book was longer. Dame Fiona Kidman told an interviewer recently that she thought barreling through seven decades of New Zealand history with “a story integrated” was “an interesting exercise … Read more
Sarah Laing reviews The Tidal Zone by Granta Books novelist Sarah Moss. I left this book lying around decoratively before I read it. I snapped a picture and posted it on Instagram. It had such a beautiful cover – an adolescent girl who might have escaped from a Vermeer painting, and lost her pearl earring on … Read more
Wyoming Paul reviews Dear Mr M, the latest novel by Herman Koch, who once again dissects middle-class urban professional fuck-ups. Mr M’s downstairs neighbour is listening when he takes a shower. He’s imagining the scene at his dinner table and the look on M’s wrinkled face when he makes love to his much younger wife. … Read more
Dan Kelly reviews Far and Away: Reporting on the Brink of Change, a collection of reportage by superstar US foreign correspondent Andrew Solomon. The task undertaken by Andrew Solomon in Far And Away, a collection of travel writing and reportage spanning 25 years and some 23 countries, is more than the urge to document and bear … Read more
Mary Macpherson reviews a massive new photography book devoted to the subject of loving, hating, joyous, miserable families. Take a deep breath before diving into this book. The bitter-sweet experience of family life is laid bare in over 300 photographs across nearly 40 portfolios. The trumpeting of quantity is part of the Photography Now series marketing … Read more
Stephen Daisley will speak in Christchurch and Dunedin this weekend about his novel Coming Rain, which won the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards book of the year. But is it actually any good? Owen Marshall slips on his gown and his powdered wig, and passes judgment. The strongest and best expressed relationships in Stephen Daisley’s award-winning … Read more
Linda Burgess examines the case of American novelist Cathleen Schine, who seems more famous for leaving New Yorker film critic David Denby for another woman than she does as a writer who is adored by Meg Worlitzer and Alison Lurie. One of the things you can judge a book by are the author’s acknowledgements. If … Read more
Saradha Koirala reviews two teen novels which both deal with girls who have “survived something horrific at the hands of a male classmate”. I will talk literature with anyone who’ll listen. Most recently the ones listening have been clinical psychologists. And yes, I’m sure it’s all very Freudian that my mum and my partner share … Read more
Nick Bollinger reviews What Happened Miss Simone?, the biography of black American singer and activist, Nina Simone. If music is some kind of social barometer, then America is brewing a civil war. It would be hard to find a significant hip-hop or R&B record in the past year that hasn’t raised its voice in anger … Read more
Tim Upperton reviews a new collection of essays by Wellington writer Ashleigh Young. Some essayists shine a torch in the darkness, and propose a way forward. Another kind of essayist – the Ashleigh Young kind – whispers, “We are lost, we are lost. Let’s try this way,” and, taking us by the hand, leads us deeper … Read more
Holly Walker reviews The Natural Way of Things, the award-winning novel by Australian writer Charlotte Wood There’s something inevitable, natural even, about the way victims of sexual abuse can end up being blamed for what’s happened to them. Sometimes it’s so overt and egregious that we’ll all be outraged – like the Canadian judge who … Read more
Harry Potter tragic obsessive fan Charlotte Graham reviews Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. [SPOILERS] everywhere. You’ve been warned. Harry Potter hasn’t slept much for 20 years and it has made him sort of a dickhead. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a delicious hot mess of time travel and popular fanfiction tropes from the … Read more
Peter Wells expands on his recent, pathetically small Listener review of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell to say exactly why he thinks it’s a masterpiece. Once upon a time, and comparatively recently, gay fiction provided a window not only into how gay men lived, but also a portal into the eroticism and interior of our … Read more
The world is a fucked-up place with terrorists controlling the narrative (and the images), and distracted, anxious, over-fed America slouching towards a Trump apocalypse. Don DeLillo anticipated the way things have turned out; to mark the publication of his latest book, the Spinoff Review of Books devotes the entire week to the work of maybe the world’s … Read more
The world is a fucked-up place with terrorists controlling the narrative (and the images), and distracted, anxious, over-fed America slouching towards a Trump apocalypse. Don DeLillo anticipated the way things have turned out; to mark the publication of his latest book, the Spinoff Review of Books devotes the entire week to the work of maybe the world’s … Read more
Sarah Laing reviews The Girls by American author Emma Cline, hyped as the next big thing in US writing. After I finished reading Emma Cline’s The Girls, I googled her. I have this notion that proper reviewers meditate on a book in a hermetically sealed intellectual space, sipping green tea and arranging river stones as … Read more
Wyoming Paul reviews two new New Zealand novels by women authors. She enjoys one but the other one leaves her cold. Debra Daley’s The Revelations of Carey Ravine and The Quiet Spectacular by Laurence Fearnley are both written by women and celebrate women. In Fearnley’s case, I wanted – but failed – to like a … Read more
Margo White reviews All At Sea by Decca Aitkenhead. It was a cloudless, calm Caribbean morning in Calabash Bay, Jamaica. From the porch of her holiday house, Decca Aitkenhead could see her four-year-old son, Jake, paddling in the shallow water, still in his pyjamas and at the feet of his Dad, Tony. A couple of minutes … Read more
“Lionel Shriver has written a gripping novel about fiscal and monetary policy,” says reviewer Holly Walker, “and the punchline is this: America is fucked. “ In humans, the mandible is the largest and strongest bone in the face. In insects, mandibles are those freaky appendages near the mouth, used to grab food and fend off … Read more
Sarah Laing – and her mum – “absolutely loves” The Gustav Sonata, the purringly well-made new novel by Rose Tremain. Rose Tremain is my mother’s kind of writer – which is not to say that I don’t like her too. My mother has certain criteria when it comes to books: they can have tragedy but ultimately there … Read more
Giovanni Tiso on American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, written in Italian, and put back into English by Elena Ferrante’s translator. What? In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges tells the story of a man who embarks on a project to rewrite Don Quixote word for word, not merely as a copy, … Read more
Geoff Dyer loves Annie Dillard so that should be a recommendation but actually isn’t she just kind of like totally weird? Rebecca Priestley reviews the US personal essayist. What does it feel like to be alive? What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would … Read more
Peter Wells reviews Katherine Mansfield’s The Urewera Notebook, edited by Anna Plumridge. The Napier-Taupo road has the high status of being one of those roads on which you lose cellphone coverage. This means you leave behind the 21st Century. You plunge into the uncertainties of real time, presented naked of technology to the landscape. And the landscape itself … Read more
An essay by Gary Steel on the hits and myths of Flying Nun, as chronicled by the record company’s founder Roger Shepherd in his new best-selling memoir. Flying Nun. Was there ever a record label that was more famous than any of its acts? It’s the home of the “Dunedin sound”, The Clean, The Chills, … Read more