If you’ve ever wondered what influencers have to offer to the world, look no further than Simone Anderson’s new recipe book So Delish!, which will revolutionise the way you put things on plates and in freezers. You know what I’m tired of? Professional cooks publishing cookbooks. Boring. If I ever fancy making coconut tamarind prawns, … Read more
Take a vicarious roadie via Attraction, the novel by Ruby Porter that was longlisted for the country’s biggest fiction prize. Released last year, it’s now a slightly eerie snapshot of Aotearoa as we were. Attraction is a New Zealand road trip novel with a heavy dose of postcolonial guilt. Whitewashing, cultural amnesia, reckoning with intergenerational … Read more
At 16, apropos of nothing, Elizabeth Engledow set herself a Herculean task: read all the classics. Six years in she wondered, would we like to publish a few reviews? The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, 1915 It’s a novella, yes, but don’t underestimate the little guys. Gregor Samsa is a door-to-door salesman with a dick … Read more
Sam Brooks reviews Before the Coffee Gets Cold – which Aucklanders, inexplicably, will not stop buying – and finds a book that sits oddly out of its native language and native form. For an extraordinary five weeks straight, a certain slim $20 novel has topped the Unity Auckland charts. That’s after making the Top 10 … Read more
The prime minister says her misbehaving coalition cabinet minister is taking the Cabinet Manual away to study. Is it the perfect page-turner beach read? Madeleine Chapman finds out. This story was published in October 2019. Is there anything better than reading a trashy thriller while on holiday? For Shane Jones, only one thing: Threatening political … Read more
Psychiatry always thinks it’s on the verge of understanding and curing mental illness, but its real history is a story of torturers and frauds, a new book shows. Danyl Mclauchlan reviews Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington. If you visit your GP and tell them you have the symptoms of a mental illness – maybe your … Read more
Sam Brooks, lifelong gamer, lost himself on a virtual battlefield in the days after his mother’s death. Here, he reviews a book by a kindred spirit: Lost in A Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do For Us, by psychologist Pete Etchells. The person who got me into video games … Read more
Crocodiles, gold bars, birds of prey… and boobs. Erin Harrington, an academic specialising in horror and film, reviews the much-hyped new novel by the man who gave us Dr Hannibal Lecter. Cari Mora is Thomas Harris’s first novel in 13 years, and the first since his 1975 debut Black Sunday that doesn’t feature his most … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews Late in the Day, a “smooth and sinuous and subtle” new novel by Tessa Hadley We begin with a death, a very good place to start. Where better to assemble and introduce family and friends? What more useful springboard for exploring their relationships? Tessa Hadley does all this superbly, with economy, elegance … Read more
AUT diet researcher George Henderson beholds the new weight-loss bible by 5:2 diet superstar Dr Michael Mosley – and declares it a triumph, with its “relaxed, considered, co-operative, mindful, repeatable, and hopefully enjoyable approach.” Disclaimer: This is a review of a book that supplies strong medical advice about diet. If you’re interested in it but … Read more
Jesse Mulligan reviews the new cookbook by Jamie Oliver. His calm and measured verdict: It stinks. This post was originally published 1 November 2018. I made three dishes from this cookbook and they all stank. One of them was the pot-roasted cauliflower, a recipe pushed hard in the Jamie Cooks Italy publicity materials, and one … Read more
All week this week we count down the five best books of 2018. Number two: Leonie Hayden reviews the text book Māori Made Easy 2 by Scotty Morrison. This is about Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy 2. This is not about Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy 2. It’s about te reo Māori, and the hole … Read more
Book of the Week: Charlotte Grimshaw reviews the profound final volume of the My Struggle series by the one and only Karl Ove Knausgaard. The first thing to say about The End, the sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series, My Struggle, is that it’s 1153 pages long. It’s enormous and it’s a … Read more
Steve Braunias reviews the new autobiography by Roger Daltrey, singer with one of the best and worst groups of all times, The Who. The Who! Godawful mostly, although not always. All those unlistenable rock operas and what-not. Tommy. Jesus. But even that fruity melodrama about a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure did well … Read more
Steve Braunias heads out to New Lynn to ponder two new books on His Holiness of the Church of Enduring Beatlemania, John Lennon. There is a new, beautifully produced and monumentally pompous book about John Lennon, Imagine John Yoko, and the best and most impressive place to inspect this holy relic in Auckland, in New … Read more
Veteran sports hack Joseph Romanos reviews My Life, My Fight by Steven Adams with Madeleine Chapman. Disclaimer: Madeleine Chapman is a staff writer at The Spinoff. This review was commissioned independently by our books editor, Steve Braunias. To judge by his autobiography, Steven Adams must be about the most down-to-earth, unprepossessing 25-year-old multi-millionaire on Earth. … Read more
Stephanie Johnson suspects the debut novel by English writer Lisa Halliday is “the first flaring of a great talent”. Lisa Halliday’s novel Asymmetry is divided into three parts. “Folly” is the first and longest, and concerns a love affair between Alice, a young publishing assistant, and Ezra Blazer, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning author many years … Read more
Tina Shaw reviews Fiona Kidman’s powerful and haunting new novel based on the short life and brutal death of Albert Black, hanged at Mt Eden jail in 1955. Fiona Kidman is adept at casting her imagination into the past and bringing to life significant characters and times. She stepped back to the Sydney and New … Read more
Vincent O’Sullivan admires Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, who continues to write and shape novels like no other New Zealand author. A few years ago Witi Ihimaera gave the New Zealand Book Council Lecture, which he called “Where is New Zealand Literature Heading?” He ticked us off, in his engagingly vague way, for writing fiction … Read more
Claire Mabey gave birth to a 34-week-old golden-haired boy in Wellington last week. She also found the time to review a heartbreaking novel about the death of a baby. The writing of this review of Kate Duignan’s novel The New Ships got hijacked half-way by early onset pre-term labour and the arrival of my first born. A … Read more
Linda Burgess celebrates a collection of reviews and essays by the great New Yorker writer Lorrie Moore. Someone has decided that Lorrie Moore’s writing is so good, and so lasting in its impact, that it’s worth gathering up 30 years’ worth of her pieces in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The … Read more
Steph Matuku reviews the new book by Parris Goebel – dancer, superstar, role model for Polynesian youth. Parris Goebel is so driven and motivated I had to read the book lying down just to catch my breath. Short story: realised at a very young age that she loved dance and dropped out of school at … Read more
“Tyrants around the dinner table, fake news inside our heads”: Charlotte Graham-McLay celebrates the new novel by Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw. When I was a kid and nicked books from my parents’ bedroom because I’d run out of my own (the trick was to write down the page the bookmark was on, demolish the whole … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the biggest-selling book at the New Zealand Festival in Wellington in the weekend – Salt Fat Acid Heat, a cookbook like no other. At one of Samin Nosrat’s two sessions at the New Zealand Festival’s writers and readers festival in Wellington last weekend, Nosrat referred to herself as a stalker. This, she explained, was … Read more
Spinoff literary editor Steve Braunias surveys the current state of payments for book reviewing in New Zealand. As literary editor of the Spinoff Review of Books, I think about important new books, and about brilliant, thoughtful reviewers, but mostly I think about money. The budget is tight. I crouch over the pennies like a miser, … Read more
Two refugees are shut in a small cage and fed through a hole in the wires: Stephanie Johnson reviews The Cage, the claustrophobic, dystopian novel by Lloyd Jones. The back cover blurb for The Cage describes the contents as “a profound and unsettling fable”. It’s a little-known fact that very often writers themselves pen these descriptions … Read more
Philip Matthews on the Alanis Morrissette of literature – yelping, abrasive 90s has-been Martin Amis. The 1990s come flooding back as you read The Rub of Time, a collection of essays, features and reviews by Martin Amis. It’s so 90s it should require a soundtrack by Alanis Morissette or the Cranberries. Was there ever a more 90s … Read more
Han Kang won the international Booker Prize for her depressing novel The Vegetarian. Her follow-up, The White Book, is even bleaker, writes Wyoming Paul. A 22-year-old woman has given birth to a premature baby girl, alone in her house in a remote area, with no way to call either her husband or a doctor. During the birth she … 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