Category Archives: Book Review

The Writers’ Festival is a rollicking good read about the six months leading up to an Auckland Writers’ Festival, the Festival itself and then the aftermath.  It is a stand-alone novel but does include some characters from the author’s previous … Continue reading →

Chappy is a family saga spanning the decades from the 1920s through the second world and into the 1980s – detailing lives, loves and losses.  Daniel is a young man feeling out of place and context in the ‘stoniness’ of … Continue reading →

The Hiding Places is a study in grief and penance – for losses and crimes both real and imagined.  I loved Robertson’s romantic trilogy starting with The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid – a series of elevated genre-referential funny … Continue reading →

The novella The Ted Dreams first appeared as an eBook and is now included in Weldon’s selection of her own short stories: Mischief.  The novella is about Phyllis, a woman with psychic abilities; a luridly tragic past and spooky identical twins. Her … Continue reading →

Catherine Lacey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and has taught Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York.  I have reviewed Nobody is Ever Missing here because it is set in New Zealand, and also because it is extraordinary. Elyria … Continue reading →

The Chimes is a debut novel set in a dystopian London where society has fallen back into medieval struggle.  The ‘Order’ has wiped, and continues to wipe, memory from the general population under the guise of paternalistic caring – violence … Continue reading →

What a lovely book about choices and relationships and art and deep sea diving.  Quinn is an artist worried that her best creative days might have passed but unwilling to compromise her lifestyle.  And did she knowingly wreck Marcus’ marriage, … Continue reading →

I so wanted to like this book!  McNaughton’s debut novel New Hokkaido is set in a counterfactual New Zealand where there was no bombing of Pearl Harbour, the US did not enter the Second World War, and the Japanese invaded and … Continue reading →

“There is a form of idleness that is not relaxation, but the expression of malaise, a disenchantment with life.”  Sheff has become disenchanted with his newspaper job and resigns with vague plans of travelling overseas.  His father is dying of … Continue reading →