Moonshine Eggs
Russell Haley
Titus Press, $34.00,
ISBN 9781877441578
If a novelist calls his main character Rejekt, he can rationalise the name as part of his character’s Czech gypsy heritage. But obviously the late Russell Haley, in this posthumously published novel, wouldn’t be dealing with Harry Rejekt, if Harry wasn’t a reject from wider society. A solitary. A guy living on his own and not quite getting the hang of connecting with other people.
Risking Their Lives: New Zealand Abortion Stories 1900-1939
Margaret Sparrow
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776561636
Dear Len, I am afraid my boy friend is just another dirty rotten Aussie. I don’t think he ever had any intention of doing anything to help me … he’s all gas and wind … I haven’t any right to ask you to do this for me but would you go and see that Chemist who you said might do it and ask how much he charges … I will be grateful to you all my life and will never forget how straight and swell you are … Cheerio. Joan.
Make Her Praises Heard Afar: New Zealand Women Overseas in World War One
Jane Tolerton
Booklovers Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780473399658
As many scholars have observed, it is very difficult to write a history of women and war. Not only is war regarded culturally as men’s domain, but capturing women’s stories is beset by methodological difficulties.
He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century
Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla
Auckland University Press, $50.00,
ISBN 9781869408664
This book is weighty with expectation, what unfolds within its covers being immediately problematised by the title, He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century. The title is a subtle nod to the reality that the “voices” the book is highlighting have yet to be heard in broad New Zealand histories.
The Ventricle of Memory
Shelagh Duckham Cox,
Shelagh Duckham Cox Co, $35.00,
ISBN 9780473363864
Casting Off
Elspeth Sandys
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9780947522551
Shelagh Duckham Cox’s memoir, The Ventricle of Memory, begins in June 1940. Aged five, Shelagh and her younger siblings are on a train bound for north Wales, having left behind their substantial upper-middle-class home in Surrey, and “the people who used to look after our family”: the gardener, the gardener’s boy, nanny, housemaid, kitchen-maid and cook, as well as a much-loved grandmother. Her parents sit opposite them, and Shelagh watches her mother’s “secret smile” as she lights a cigarette, only to be interrupted by baby Katherine’s cry. “Do something,” her father says, and returns to his book.