Necessary Secrets
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00,
ISBN 9781988516639
Loving Sylvie
Elizabeth Smither
Allen and Unwin, $37.00,
ISBN 9781988547114
Two recently-published novels explore inter-generational stories, yet there couldn’t be two more different treatments.
Scoundrels and Eccentrics of the Pacific
John Dunmore
Upstart Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781988516219
William Deans: The Passionate Pioneer
Louise Deans
Wily Publications, $35.00,
ISBN: 9781927167342
Just as Australia’s Outback has its “characters” (according to popular legend, at least), so that other vast open space near us in New Zealand, the Pacific, has or had its eccentrics – people who, for a variety of reasons, found their own settled societies too small, too tight, or too law-abiding, and who preferred the watery immensity of the planet’s largest ocean, dotted with its constellations of islands, as the stage set for their lives.
The Jersey: The Secrets Behind the World’s Most Successful Team
Peter Bills
Pan Macmillan, $38.00,
ISBN 9781509856688
Murdoch: The All Black Who Never Returned
Ron Palenski
Upstart Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781988516127
The cultural historian E H McCormick once noted that the only genuine masterpiece created in New Zealand was the Māori carved war canoe. The argument can be made that the national men’s rugby team, the All Blacks, can be added to McCormick’s list.
Through the Lonesome Dark
Paddy Richardson
Upstart Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781927262986
Paddy Richardson takes a risk with her latest novel. By setting it in Blackball, a mining town on the West Coast in the early 1900s, she raises expectations of another Denniston Rose, and for well over 100 pages, readers could be forgiven for believing that they are reading a similar tale of a spirited young woman in trying circumstances.
Obsession
Elspeth Sandys
Upstart Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781927262900
Set mostly in the 1980s, Elspeth Sandys’s Obsession explores the dynamics of a relationship fuelled by desire and driven by a symbiotic need for intimacy. The narrative is purportedly written by a third party – who bears the sobriquet of the Dally poet – in a manuscript we are told in the foreword was discovered after his death. For those who like to judge a book by its cover, its design features three pressed flowers on a parchment-coloured background bearing faint traces of script, with the same theme continued through to the back in a graphic depiction of its contents. Combined with creamy pages inside, it’s a handsome book to own and shelve.
Love as a Stranger
Owen Marshall
Vintage, $38.00, ISBN 9781775538578
The Antipodeans
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00, ISBN 9781927262030
In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17th-century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca: “When love is not madness, it is not love.” And the opening sentence in the opening chapter, set in the present, but located in a 19th-century Auckland cemetery, establishes with a limpid calm a story that is both pleasingly, disarmingly familiar and subtly marbled with a sinister unease:
First Lady – From Boyhood to Womanhood: The Incredible Story of New Zealand’s Sex-change Pioneer
Liz Roberts with Alison Mau
Upstart Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781927262375
Sexual Cultures in Aotearoa New Zealand Education
Alexandra C Gunn and Lee A Smith (eds)
Otago University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781877578687
2014 was the transgender tipping point. At least that’s what Time Magazine declared, with its front cover featuring the transgender actress Laverne Cox poised mid-step, svelte and powerful, beside the subheading “Men cannot become women. Women cannot become men”. This heading – possibly perplexing to those unfamiliar with transgender issues – is part of the media’s growing sensitivity towards trans identities: if someone born male wants to be a woman, then they always were a woman; it is society that categorised them as a man.
Dan Carter: My Story
Dan Carter with Duncan Greive
Upstart Press, $50.00
ISBN 9781927262382
Here’s a crazy idea – get someone who doesn’t give a toss about rugby to review the autobiography of the world’s greatest rugby union fly-half. Madness.
Dan Carter: My Story has featured on the bestseller lists since it was launched just days after the All Blacks’ Rugby World Cup win last October – the game (spoiler alert) New Zealand won, in which Dan Carter kicked four penalties, two conversions and a drop goal, and was named the Man of the Match. A game I didn’t watch. (I know – handing in my New Zealand passport now.) But, after initial hesitation, I figured Carter, his writing collaborator Duncan Greive, and their book, would cheerfully survive no matter what I thought. It seemed that me reviewing it was a risk that wouldn’t involve a knockout win or loss for anyone.
Fallout
Paul Thomas
Upstart Press, $35.00, ISBN 9781927262016
Where the Dead Men Go
Liam McIlvanney
Faber & Faber, $25.00, ISBN 9780571239863
New Zealand crime fiction is going from strength to strength, with great work being published by old favourites as well as the up-and-coming. This pair of novels by writers Paul Thomas and Liam McIlvanney explore the minefield of the political realm to underpin their stories.