Blog Archives

Keeping it in the family, Tina Shaw

Necessary Secrets
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00,
ISBN 9781988516639

Loving Sylvie
Elizabeth Smither
Allen and Unwin, $37.00,
ISBN 9781988547114

Two recently-published novels explore inter-generational stories, yet there couldn’t be two more different treatments.

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Love and war, Murray Bramwell

Love as a Stranger
Owen Marshall
Vintage, $38.00, ISBN 9781775538578

The Antipodeans
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00, ISBN 9781927262030

In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17th-century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca: “When love is not madness, it is not love.” And the opening sentence in the opening chapter, set in the present,  but located in a 19th-century Auckland cemetery, establishes with a limpid calm a story that is both pleasingly, disarmingly familiar and subtly marbled with a sinister unease:

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Becoming heroic, Garth Baker

The Open Side Richie McCaw (with Greg McGee) Hodder Moa, $50.00, ISBN 9781869712761 Valerie: The Autobiography Valerie Adams (with Phil Gifford) Hodder Moa, $50.00, ISBN 9781869712624 Let’s start with the numbers, all big. The initial 60,000 print run of Richie

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review, Sport

Finding touch, Chris Laidlaw

Tall Tales (Some True): Memoirs of an Unlikely Writer Greg McGee Penguin Books, $37.00, ISBN 9780143009139 McGee describes himself as an unlikely writer. This rather begs the question: what makes for a likely writer? Someone who has been brought up

See more ›

Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Media, Non-fiction, Review
Search the archive
Search by category