No Simple Passage Jenny Robin Jones Random House, $45.00, ISBN 9781869795108 We are all increasingly fascinated by our origins. And as recollection turns into memory and then into family anecdote, we go looking for these origins in documentation. This,…
Logan Campbell’s Auckland: Tales from the Early Years R C J Stone Auckland University Press, $45.00, ISBN 9781869403935 Wellington: Biography of a City Redmer Yska Reed, $44.99, ISBN 0790011077 Auckland illuminated through stories of the past; Wellington reconstructed through careful…
White Chief: The Colourful Life and Times of Judge F E Maning of the Hokianga John Nicholson Penguin, $39.95, ISBN 0143020226 In Omapere Museum in the Hokianga, the area F E Maning called home for most of his life, a…
Catching the Current Jenny Pattrick Black Swan, $27.95, ISBN 1869417259 Union Belle Deborah Challinor HarperCollins, $31.99, ISBN 186950559X The Love Apple Coral Atkinson Black Swan, $27.95, ISBN 1869417208 New Zealanders, we are told, are avid for their history. To help…
What Happen Then, Mr Bones? Charlotte Randall Penguin, $28.00, ISBN 0143019171 With her three previous novels, Dead Sea Fruit, The Curative and Within the Kiss, Charlotte Randall has developed a voice clearly identifiable in New Zealand literature. In What Happen…
Writers In Residence: A Journey with Pioneer New Zealand Writers Jenny Robin Jones Auckland University Press, $44.99, ISBN 1869403029 As Edward Gibbon Wakefield wrote in 1829: Literary men, men of science, philosophers, do not emigrate to new colonies where their…
Measurement Tim Corballis Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734433 Writing a review of Tim Corballis’ second novel Measurement feels a bit like writing a review of a review. The fictitious book constantly referred to by the narrator, Measurement by Peter Korngold,…