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.
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:
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…
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…