Now When it Rains – A Writer’s Memoir
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Steele Roberts, $35.00,
ISBN 9780947493776
A boy needs a father, but things can go badly wrong if the father is not good at fathering. This seems to be one of the main ideas implicit in Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s “writer’s memoir”.
The Waikato – A History of New Zealand’s Greatest River
Paul Moon
Atuanui Press, $70.00, ISBN 9780994137616
At 425 kilometres, the Waikato is the longest river in New Zealand. The case Paul Moon makes in The Waikato – A History of New Zealand’s Greatest River is that it is also the most culturally significant.
Helen Clark: Inside Stories
Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon (eds)
Auckland University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 978186940 8381
She led the parliamentary Labour Party for 15 years and served for nine years as New Zealand’s first elected woman prime minister. She is clearly a person of formidable intelligence, steely determination, and a strong sense of her social objectives. On the New Zealand scene, she was always a canny political operator who knew how to manoeuvre her way through challenges from both outside and inside her own party. (You don’t get re-elected three times as prime minister without having these skills.)
Purgatory
Rosetta Allan
Penguin, $30.00
ISBN 9780143571025
James Cook’s New World
Graeme Lay
Fourth Estate, $37.00
ISBN 9781775540410
There’s one current phenomenon in New Zealand literature that I’m watching with great interest. It’s the fact that, with a few honourable exceptions (Hamish Clayton’s Wulf, Owen Marshall’s The Larnachs, and the historical reconstructions of Peter Wells), all the best New Zealand historical novels are now being written by women – Paula Morris’s Rangatira, Charlotte Randall’s Hokitika Town and The Bright Side of My Condition, Sarah Quigley’s The Conductor, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and (with minor misgivings) Tina Makereti’s Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings.
Rangatira Paula Morris Penguin Books, $30.00, ISBN 978014565758 What is the value to us of historical novels? They are valuable only when they try to reconstruct the mentality of the past. Second-rate historical novels dress up modern characters in…