Sodden Downstream
Brannavan Gnanalingam
Lawrence and Gibson, $29.00,
ISBN 9780473410292

She walked in the hope that the tracks would lift her up, like the travelator that she marvelled at the airport, and carry her to Wellington. But there was no magic around. The bushes next to the tracks looked as if they would eat Sita up. The overhead wires looked as if they were glued on to rusty pylons. She saw smashed green beer bottles and junk mail strewn on the grass. She decided to walk on the other side of the road. If a train went past, at least she could wait half an hour for the next one. The longer she took, the less money she’d earn, but she was going to get there unless a wall of water was in the way.

Mazarine
Charlotte Grimshaw
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143771821

“Long ago”, the central character of Mazarine, Charlotte Grimshaw’s latest novel, writes, “I’d had an idea for a series of books in which the narratives were linked in the shape of a flower, with a central point and petals growing off it, because stories aren’t necessarily linear …”

Baby
Annaleese Jochems 
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776561667

The Man Who Would Not See
Rajorshi Chakraborti
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143771784

Money in the Morgue
Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy
HarperCollins, $30.00,
ISBN 9780008207113

“I hear you like a good thriller, David,” said New Zealand Books’s courteous email. “Is that right?”

I responded with the dignified aloofness that marks all my exchanges with editors and publishers. “Oh yes. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Actually, the resident thriller expert is my wife. Beth has shelves solid with crime classics: Christie, James (P D, not Henry), Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Price. She’s numbered their spines according to publication dates. She can discourse about Allingham’s aristocratic scion Albert Campion developing as books pass, whereas Price’s MI6 agent and middle-class fellow David Audley doesn’t. She and her friend since high school, Elizabeth Smither (name-dropper? moi?), talk about how Poirot’s patent-leather shoes mean he has to operate cerebrally rather than physically; how traumatic it was to see Nero Wolfe shedding weight to elude an assassin; how Agatha Christie’s other narrators, Tommy and Tuppence, need a good smack.

All This by Chance
Vincent O’Sullivan
Victoria University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781776561797

All This by Chance is not a Holocaust novel nor a Jewish one, according to author Vincent O’Sullivan. It is a Kiwi story. But the book is most likely to be seen as a Holocaust novel: “about the legacy of the Holocaust” for three generations of Jewish women, as the promotion states.