Growing up, as I did, in a bookish and quietly religious household, I concluded at an early age that a “good’” book – and that meant the classics, the reading of which was assumed to make you a better person – had…
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Blog Archives
No easy answers, Kirstie Archer
A Passing Guest Elspeth Sandys Flamingo, $24.95, ISBN 1869504054 In A Passing Guest, Elspeth Sandys bravely tackles contemporary New Zealand issues which many Pakeha authors shy away from: Maori and Pakeha relationships, Maori poverty, gang culture, and family breakdown. The…
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Tagged with: Elspeth Sandys, Flamingo, Issue 56, Kirstie Archer, Summer 2001
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Distance and dislocation, Patricia Glensor
Best Friends Elspeth Sandys, David Ling Publishing, $19.95 Dunedin Shena Mackay, Penguin, $19.95 Both of these books deal with distance – within relationships and across time and space – and with dislocation, of various and at times particularly Antipodean kinds. Many…
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Tagged with: David Ling Publishing, Elspeth Sandys, Issue 10, Patricia Glensor, Penguin, Shena Mackay, Spring 1993
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Big questions: part answers, James Norcliffe
Why Things Fall Chris Else, Tandem, $24.95 Love and War Elspeth Sandys, Vintage, $24.95 Jim’s Elvis Colleen Reilly, John McIndoe, $19.95 Why Things Fall at first glance seems quite a departure from Chris Else’s earlier ficciones, Dreams of Pythagoras (1981). Grounded in a…
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Tagged with: Chris Else, Colleen Reilly, Elspeth Sandys, Issue 7, James Norcliffe, John McIndoe, Summer 1992, Tandem, Vintage
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Two sisters and a witch, Rebekah Palmer
The Word Burners Beryl Fletcher, Daphne Brasell Associates, Wellington, 1991, $19.95 Finding Out Elspeth Sandys, Vintage New Zealand, Auckland, 1991, $24.95 The night-witch is invoked early in The Word Burners. The main character, Julia, tells her children of a lonely witch who lived…
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Tagged with: Autumn 1992, Beryl Fletcher, Daphne Brasell Associates Press, Elspeth Sandys, Issue 4, Rebekah Palmer, Vintage New Zealand
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
A seat on the bus, Elspeth Sandys
The recent tragic death of novelist and short-story writer Bronwyn Tate set me thinking, not for the first time, about why her works were not better known in this country. I’m not alone in regarding her as a fine writer,…
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