Review

Cambridge editor and author Stephen Stratford chooses books of verse by a couple of good old boys, and a good-looking book by an artist. Looking Out to Sea, by Kevin Ireland (Steele Roberts) It took me a long time to read this: every night I would read the first poem, for Ireland’s late brother, which … Read more

Wellington author Elspeth Sandys chooses two venerable geniuses of modern fiction – Anne Tyler, and Kate Grenville. Reading Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is like visiting an old and trusted friend. The familiar themes – family and domestic life; the passage of Time; suburban America – are all there, but with a novelist of … Read more

Auckland writer Thom Shackleford chooses a memoir by the divine Patti Smith, a brilliant  investigation into social media shaming by Jon Ronson, and a story collection featuring the divinely brilliant Don DeLillo. M Train, by Patti Smith. No one does melancholic cool quite like Patti Smith. With the independence of her children and the distant … Read more

Auckland author Peter Simpson chooses six books by New Zealand authors, including one of the favourites to win the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards prize for best novel. Last year as one of five judges of the final New Zealand Post Book Awards I read virtually every local book published. I can’t recall precisely … Read more

Wellington arts festival dude and former book pages editor guy Guy Somerset chooses short story collections by Joy Williams, Lucia Berlin, and the king of the asterixes, Bill Manhire. This year, via new collections of their stories, I discovered two wonderful American writers who had somehow escaped my attention entirely during the past 35 years of my reading life, which … Read more

Auckland reviewer David Larsen selects the blockbuster Barrowman bio as his best of the year, and then journeys into the genre of sci-fi and fantasy and that. No question, my book of 2015 was Maurice Gee: Life and Work, by Rachel Barrowman. Long years of research and thought went into this: so often fatal. But … Read more

Christchurch writer Rachael King chooses three New Zealand novels, and two personal essays by two extremely cool American women. The Chimes, by Anna Smaill I loved the premise of The Chimes from when I first heard of it. It demands to be read slowly while savouring the puzzle of the language, the rules of the … Read more

The sombre tale of two Southern Men facing up to the fact – or doing their best to ignore the fact – that one of them has a year left to live. Media veterans and lifelong friends, Colin Hogg and Gordon McBride, are chatting in the embers of a Hogg birthday afternoon, sun sinking slowly. McBride’s … Read more

A Year of Good Eating: The Kitchen Diaries III by Nigel Slater, reviewed by Ben Sheehan. I find myself at an odd point of life. Mid-to-late twenties, struggling to understand how I’m ever going to join the ludicrous Auckland property market. Pretty normal in that sense I guess, but I’m mostly at an odd point … Read more

On Writing by Charles Bukowski On Writing is not an instruction manual. Nobody who knows anything about Bukowski’s boozy, belligerent shambles of a life would expect one. As he was fond of confessing, Bukowski did not like people. Even as a baby in the cradle, he reports in his largely autobiographical 1982 novel Ham on … Read more

The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates ‘As a writer,’ writes Joyce Carol Oates, 241 pages into her memoir, ‘I have not been drawn to what is called memoirist prose because I have never felt that my life could be nearly as interesting as what my imagination could make of … Read more

Simon Winchester takes on his most difficult subject yet – a biography of the Pacific. Graeme Lay delves deep, deep into its depths.  There can be few people who when flying over the Pacific Ocean haven’t stared down from a window seat at the dark, wind-scuffed blueness below with a sense of wonder. Understandably so. … Read more

Guy Somerset reviews The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays by writer and critic James Wood. Good writing rubs off. When a good writer notices something, it helps us notice too. Good criticism also rubs off. When a good critic notices the noticing, we notice the noticing as well. It’s an almost virtuous circle. … Read more

Sue Orr reviews the work of poet Bill Manhire, a sprawling effort covering themes as diverse as animal rights and personal identity. It’s a thing writers often do, when they get a new book by a fellow author. They flick to the dedication page, curious for the identity of the wing-person who endured years (probably) … Read more

‘There was a mistake made on the day I was born, when I come to think of it,’ begins the narrator of Sweet Caress, Amory Clay, recalling how her father put her down in the birth notices as a boy. ‘Why did he say “son”? To spite his wife, my mother? Or was it a … Read more

The novel that won this year’s Man Booker Prize runs 688 pages. Peter Simpson gets stuck in.  A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James There is a scene in Marlon James’ vast, grim, dark, compelling, and (now) Man Booker prize winning novel, that threw me back more than 40 years to my only first-hand … Read more

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Satin Island – Tom McCarthy’s second novel shortlisted for the Man Booker award – is the story of U (that’s all we ever know of his name) and his work, as an anthropologist/corporate ethnographer, at the Company (that’s all we ever know of its name). … Read more

Patrick Evans’s last novel was about Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame – a clever piece of ventriloquism in which the Sargeson voice and character are accurately caught. This new novel takes the theme, or subject, or obsession, one stage further and beyond ‘the facts’. New Zealand (Canterbury) novelist Raymond Thomas Lawrence has won the Nobel … Read more