Gifted Patrick Evans Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 9780864736376 A curious rumour about this new novel by Patrick Evans preceded its publication. The rumour was that Evans had done something exceptionally good and it came from people one didn’t…
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,…
Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World Lydia Wevers Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736352 The big sheep and cattle stations of 19th-century New Zealand and books were tough, physical, practical places, where men (and a…
Blue Water: Salt-encrusted Stories of a Life at Sea Lindsay Wright HarperCollins, $35.00, ISBN 9781869509002 “ ‘Let’s sail to the Arctic next spring,’ I suggested to Sarah … She gave me a long, cool look … ‘Okay, if you really…
Report on Experience: John Mulgan Peter Whiteford (ed) Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736192 In Keats’s last letter, sent from Rome to his friend Charles Brown in England three months before he died, he writes of his “habitual feeling of…