Where We Land
Tim Jones
The Cuba Press, $22.00,
ISBN 9781988595023
Īnangahua Gold
Kathleen Gallagher
KingFisher Publishing $30.00
ISBN 978047345945I
Small presses continue to publish some of our most exciting new fiction. Both Where We Land and Īnangahua Gold take us away from present-day New Zealand. In doing so, they ask us to consider where we have come from and where we are going.
Winter Of Fire (25th Anniversary Edition)
Sherryl Jordan
Scholastic, $19.00,
ISBN 9781775435983
I was ten when Winter Of Fire was first released, three years after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It was a little later that I read Sherryl Jordan’s novel: maybe in 1997, when Jenny Shipley became prime minister, or 1999, when Helen Clark was elected. The unforgettable protagonist, Elsha of the Quelled, would have been another model of female leadership in a patriarchal world. I wonder if 14-year-old Jacinda Ardern read Winter of Fire the year it came out? It might have been inspiring.
Winter Of Fire (25th Anniversary Edition)
Sherryl Jordan
Scholastic, $19.00,
ISBN 9781775435983
A dismal world where the sun has disappeared is the backdrop for Sherryl Jordan’s hard-hitting and powerful novel Winter Of Fire. Back in print 25 years after its initial publication, Winter Of Fire blends a strong, rebellious protagonist with the difficult themes of slavery, sexism and pollution, to create a powerhouse of a novel with ideas that still stand strong today.
Peat
Lynn Jenner
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781988531694
Lynn Jenner lives on the Kāpiti Coast, not far from the new expressway between Mackays Crossing and Peka Peka. She writes in Peat that thinking about the construction of the road meant that she needed “the close company of a writer as a bulwark against its enacted power and concrete”. Charles Brasch, whose work she hardly knew before she started her project, was the chosen author. The resulting book is a marvellous and unexpected combination of the two topics.
The Cat From Muzzle Sally Sutton (Scott Tulloch illus) Puffin, $20.00, ISBN 9780143773085 Bess The Brave War Horse Susan Brocker (Raymond McGrath illus) Scholastic, $28.00, ISBN 9781775435563 Home Child: A Child Migrant In New Zealand Dawn McMillan (Trish Bowles illus)…