There’s been a subtle change in the south. Over the past month, without any fanfare, Dunedin-based John McIndoe Ltd – the South Island’s biggest publishing house – has become McIndoe Publishers. The three women who now run the firm wanted…
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…
A Houseful of Strangers Patrick Dale, Collins, $19.95 (139 pp) Insects’ lib – the author attempts to defend the smaller occupants of our home environment against what Ruud Kleinpaste calls ‘entomo‑ignorance’. Subtitled ‘Living with the common creatures of the New…
Black Rainbow Albert Wendt, Penguin, $29.95 Octavio’s Last Invention Michael Morrissey, Brick Row, $27.95 The world of Black Rainbow is a futuristic parody based on New Zealand Pakeha values, a world without crime, poverty or unemployment founded on a comfortable, all‑pervasive Philosophy…
Natural History of New Zealand Nic Bishop, Hodder & Stoughton, $59.95 Yet another natural history of New Zealand, I hear you say, but this one is sufficiently different, attractive and up-to-date to appeal to the wide audience that is known…
One Night Out Stealing Alan Duff, Tandem Press, $24.95 Affluence, it seems, is vindicated. Whereas Once Were Warriors exposed the anguish of the dispossessed, One Night Out Stealing is more concerned with reassurances for the well-to-do that their good fortune is merited. A university degree…
The Black Robin: Saving the World’s Most Endangered Bird David Butler and Don Merton, Oxford University Press, $49.95 The story of the black robin’s rescue from the brink of extinction has been told more than once in recent years by…
Staying Home and Being Rotten Shonagh Koea, Vintage, $19.95 Unlawful Entry Marilyn Duckworth, Vintage, $19.95 It’s always presumptuous to thrust two authors under a single umbrella. At least in the present instance one can point, by way of excuse, to shared nationality,…
The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, $34.95 The barrage of criticism that greeted this book in New Zealand needs to be ignored. The exception taken to Paul Theroux’s acerbic comments about New Zealanders and…
The End of the Century at the End of the World C K Stead, Harvill/ HarperCollins, $39.95 C K Stead has always suffered from a surfeit of lucidity. This may seem like a wrong-headed thing to say. Surely those values…