Katherine Mansfield: The Story-teller Kathleen Jones Viking, $65.00, ISBN 9780670074358 Let’s hear Katherine Mansfield speak first: The cleanliness of Switzerland! Darling, it is frightening. The chastity of my lily-white bed! The waxy-fine floors! The huge bouquet of white lilac,…
Conquerors of Time Lynn McConnell SportsBooks, UK£10.00, ISBN 9781899807888 January 5 was the centenary of the birth of Jack Lovelock. A cake was cut at Timaru Boys’ High School, and a plaque was unveiled at his unlikely birthplace, the literally-named…
Access Road Maurice Gee Penguin Books, $37.00, ISBN 9780143202448 Parliaments and law courts used to “access”, though only “recess” survives in current usage. Incoming tides and the rising sun also accessed. These days we fashionably access our emails or information…
Blindsight Maurice Gee Penguin, $34.95, ISBN 0143020234 Alice Ferry, narrator and co-protagonist of Maurice Gee’s new novel, is a mycologist – an expert on fungi. That is, her professional life is devoted to studying spongy, fragile, morbid life-forms that lurk…
Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings ed Roger Robinson Streamline, $34.95, ISBN 0958210624 Everyone knows about Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), described by a contemporary as “a spirit intense and rare” and immortalised by Samoans as Tusitala (the teller of…
Sky Dancer Witi Ihimaera Penguin, $34.95, ISBN 0143018698 If Witi Ihimaera is a national treasure, he is an impishly unpredictable one. At an age when he could be securely serene, he persists with youthful glee in taking literary risks. With…
Horace at Kapiti, Roger Robinson
Early in the second of the “Four Letters in Verse” that make up Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s Poets in Our Youth, the poet is recalling for Harry Orsman how as a boarder at Weir House, I found myself in the…
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