The Empty Bed Paul Thomas HarperCollins, $31.95, ISBN 0732271703 Killings and jokes are what readers expect from Paul Thomas, after his three wonderful thrillers Old School Tie (also known as Dirty Laundry), Inside Dope and Guerilla Season. There is a…
An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame Michael King, contemporary photographs by Reg Graham Penguin Books, $39.95, ISBN 0143018388 So much has already been said. It is an irony that Janet Frame’s life, so often described as that of our…
Fq Alan Brunton Bumper Books, $32.95, ISBN 0958222541 The idea of the long poem as a stretch limo glides towards me. The vehicle is at once ostentatious and stylish, excessive and sleek. Displaying privilege, it also accommodates a raucous wedding-party…
A Sort of Conscience – The Wakefields Philip Temple Auckland University Press, $69.95, ISBN 1869402766 Myth one about the Wakefields (enshrined in colonial textbooks of long ago). The Wakefields were a great founding family of New Zealand, and Edward Gibbon…
The Blue Lion: An historical love story Graham Billing Cape Catley, $24.95, ISBN 090856192X The Blue Lion was Graham Billing’s last book, for the author of Forbush and the Penguins, The Slipway and The Chambered Nautilus died last December before…
Somebodies and Nobodies Brian Turner Vintage, $34.95 ISBN 1869415078 Few autobiographies return us to scrutinising our own lives. I’ve just had – suffered – that experience reading Brian Turner’s Somebodies and Nobodies. It covers his first 25 years, from birth…
Recycled Sandy McKay Longacre Press, $14.95, ISBN 1887135496 My Dad the All Black Sandy McKay Longacre Press, $14.95, ISBN 1887135690 The Dare Club Vince Ford Longacre Press, $14.95, ISBN 1877135682 Stranded Jan Thorburn Mallinson Rendel, $17.95, ISBN 0908783671 Aunt Effie…
Pacific Art Niu Sila: the Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts ed Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira Te Papa Press,$49.95, ISBN 0909010838 Robert Louis Stevenson, writing about Samoan culture over a century ago, expressed it thus: No occasion…
No Idle Rich; The Wealthy in Canterbury & Otago 1840-1918 Jim McAloon University of Otago Press, $39.95, ISBN 1877276235 Rich and poor have always fought a war of words – turning at times to fists, batons and cavalry charges –…