The idiocy of the powerful

Brannavan Gnanalingam on the books he read in 2022

 

 

This year I released my seventh novel, Slow Down, You’re Here. The book was a horror novel, although Lawrence & Gibson adopted the marketing tactics of Hitchcock’s Psycho in not revealing anything about the book’s actual subject. But I can say this much: the book is about the fraught nature of pleasure in a world where things are increasingly becoming scarce.

 

    

 

It was fun to research too: I read a lot of horror. The main narrative inspiration was Stephen King’s Misery. The way King uses digression / parallel narratives to ramp up tension was masterly. It allowed the structure to do the opposite of the narrative, where pleasure is displaced. The reader doesn’t get what they want, and instead have to slog through a terrible romance novel, also knowing that the ‘success’ of the terrible romance novel is what is keeping Paul Sheldon alive. I also read two of the most horrifying and rigorous stories about thwarted pleasure—Gabrielle Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac and Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting. I read a number of horror / thriller books with a common theme (which will make sense if you read my book): Junji Ito’s graphic novel Uzumaki, Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, Roland Topor’s The Tenant, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, and Charity Norman’s The Secrets of Strangers.

 

         

 

I was lucky enough to release my book with my friend and comrade at Lawrence & Gibson, Murdoch Stephens. Murdoch was the founder of Lawrence & Gibson, and I would not be a writer without him. Murdoch is also a very talented writer—intellectual without being pretentious, hilarious without being glib. His books have always featured a kind of romantic or emotional longing, and with Down from Upland, also published this year, he manages to build a poignant and hilarious account of people trying to find themselves and not realising their shortcomings along the way.

One advantage of releasing a book early in the year was that I could spend the rest of the year treating my brain as ‘fallow’ ground—I read for pleasure with no obligation to write.

 

 

 

There have been some fantastic books from Aotearoa this year. My favourite was Colleen Maria Lenihan’s Kōhine. The collection of short stories is just beautiful—all shimmering surfaces and mirrors and reflections, which belie the overwhelming central sadness that underpins the collection. On the back of 2021’s best local book, Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku, Huia is definitely on a roll. I also loved Maria Samuela’s short story collection Beats of the Pa’u, which demonstrated such care and love for her characters. Many make mistakes but they’re just trying to survive and get by—it’s a gorgeous collection.

 

     

 

I thought Coco Solid’s debut novel How to Loiter in a Turf War was brilliant: it was funny and captured the messy drift of being young while the world around changes dramatically. I also thoroughly enjoyed Anthony Lapwood’s Home Theatre (an intelligent and often surprising collection), Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds (masterly world building), and Rijula Das’ Small Deaths (a powerful novel about India’s various fault lines). In non-fiction, my favourites were Noelle McCarthy’s Grand, a beautiful account of a mother/daughter relationship, and Lana Lopesi’s thought-provoking essay collection Bloody Woman.

 

     

 

My favourite poetry was Khadro Mohamed’s luminous We’re All Made of Lightning and Anahera Gildea’s incendiary Sedition from new publishing kids on the block, We Are Babies Press and Taraheke respectively. I also caught up with a couple of brilliant NZ books I’d missed from previous years—Sam Te Kani’s Please, Call Me Jesus and Rupa Maitra’s Prophecies.

 

    

 

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was my favourite international novel. It was a brutal and caustic account of the chaos of the Sri Lankan Civil War. I was chuffed that it won the Booker Prize and—in keeping with the idiocy of the powerful depicted in the book—it was hilarious to see the very people mocked by the book celebrate the international triumph. With Anuk Arudpragasam’s shortlisted (and magnificent) A Passage North and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (the latter on my summer reading list), perhaps people are finally starting to realise that the region with the most English speakers in the world have books worthy of being published and read more widely.

 

   

 

I also loved Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams: it’s an example of how the political novel is a genuinely vital form of writing. It is a manifesto as to how to tell a tale about the ‘other’ through collaboration. It is also a mockery of certain critics who say that literature is in peril, or that self-censorship is ‘killing’ creativity. People will always find a way, provided they’re not lazy.

This year I was fortunate to interview a number of amazing writers, which allowed me to dive deep into their back catalogues: Val McDermid, Michael Robotham, JP Pomare, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In hindsight, I have no idea how I managed to yarn with such an eclectic and dazzling array of writers. Gurnah’s books were a real revelation in terms of writing about the movement of peoples and history. McDermid, Robotham, and Pomare are simply masters of narrative.

 

      

 

Because reading doesn’t have to privilege the new, I’ve loved being able to fill in some gaps. I read a few 19th century novels that were new to me—Dostoevsky’s Demons, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. One of my other great passions featured heavily in my reading this year, as I continue my plan of reading the entirety of the Heinemann African Series: I read Bessie Head, Rebeka Njau, Neshani Andreas, and Binwell Sinyangwe. I’m also a big fan of the New Narrative movement and the assorted works published by Semiotext(e). I share a similar ethos of privileging ‘flat’ writing that deliberately tries to avoid drawing attention to itself. I really enjoyed Kevin Killian’s and Fanny Howe’s writing, in particular.

 

                                                  

 

I’m looking forward to making a dent in my TBR pile this summer.  I have Geetanjali Shree, Mahasweta Devi, Dambudzo Marechera, Ferdinand Oyono, and Octavia Butler all staring back at me, waiting for the long summer evenings.

 

Crazy, Sexy, Cool

 Maggie Rainey-Smith on the books she read in 2022

 

My year of reading kickstarted when, on the second day of January, I broke my wrist. This also meant that I missed out on a teaching contract. Instead I took up a lovely opportunity to co-edit—with Linda Burgess—Room to Write, the book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Randell Cottage residencies. The book includes French writers who have lived in the cottage, but Linda and I were responsible for the 20 Kiwi writers and their submissions. All of the stories—some fiction, some not—have been translated from French to English or vice versa. I can’t lay claim to that part of the project.  But I have done a lot of close reading of stories evoking the shifting moods and inspiration of writers dislocated either by hemisphere or the gift of solitariness.

 

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One of my absolute favourite writers is the Australian novelist Michelle De Kretser. I rushed to read her latest book, Scary Monsters—it reads one way until halfway through, and then you turn it around and read another story. De Kretser writes so well about being ‘other’ and in this book she looks at racism, misogyny and ageism. I adored her Questions of Travel, which came out some years ago, as well as The Hamilton Case: I’ve been hooked ever since.

 

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Another highlight was reading Fiona Kidman’s memoir So far for now. I admired her courage and insight writing about widowhood. She never shies away from tricky topics. I am an avid reader of New Zealand literature, so also read the novel Loop Tracks by Sue Orr, and two other memoirs: Grand by Noelle McCarthy, and You probably think this song is about you by Kate Camp (whose mother is in my book group). I also helped to launch Jan FitzGerald’s fourth poetry collection, A Question Bigger Than a Hawk. But my focus in the early part of the year was on my own poetry collection, Formica. It has been a thrill to have a poetry debut published at last. I describe it as a baby-boomer memoir. It’s had very warm reviews and I’ve had the most delightful conversations with friends and strangers who have contacted me to say, ‘This is my life’. This is so interesting to me as, of course, we think our own lives unique.

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Most years now, I travel to South Korea: our youngest son has lived there for over 16 years. He is married with two darling children, my grandchildren. They live in Seoul, and I am besotted with this city, the people, the culture, and the writing.  I am known to binge on Korean Netflix and can highly recommend Our Blues, a delightful anthology-style series based on the volcanic island of Jeju and different from the melodramatic—though fabulously satisfying—Seoul-set dark dramas about greedy corporations or over-ambitious parents. I re-read The Island of Sea Women by the US author Lisa See, which is about the lives of the Jeju women divers known as haenyeo, and the brutal treatment suffered by islanders during the anti-communist fervour that followed the second World War.

 

                                

 

I also discovered the work of Hwang Sok-yong, one of South Korea’s foremost writers. His 2018 novel At Dusk, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.  It’s the story of a man born into poverty who escapes the slums to find success and wealth as director of a large architectural firm. Visiting his old neighbourhood and reconnecting with a lost love, he recognises the cost of modernity, the loss of an old lifestyle.  We see this when we visit Seoul, as our son has lived in some of the city’s less salubrious areas—Yeonsinnae and now Guro.  Almost overnight, whole blocks will vanish to be replaced by high-rise apartments.  There’s a gentle intimacy to At Dusk which I love about Korean writers, as well as the underlying darkness and the sense of outrage at injustice.

In Seoul, there’s a flea market near the Dongmyo shrine where ageing hipsters go to shop, to commune and to promenade.  In the metro I’ve often seen the mostly elderly men in their dated but colourful fashion, but until this year I’d never been to the market. My son took me, and we had the best fun: I purchased a book by Kim Dong-hyun called Mut–Street Fashion of Seoul. (Mut is his version of meot, the Korean word for cool). It’s full of glossy full-colour photos of men and women, nearly all wearing hats, and dressed in a wide variety of what might be called yesteryears’ fashion.  A delightful contrast to the hyper-conformist fashion of the younger people in the flash parts of downtown Seoul.

 

               

 

When I travel, I always take a book or two from my bookshelves that I haven’t got around to reading. This year it was Snow by the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk and I was mesmerised. I’ve owned the novel for several years and there it was, waiting for me to uncover this fascinating fictional story of an exiled poet returning to Turkey. It is politically charged both overtly and obscurely. I’ve just been re-reading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, a book that had sat on my bookshelf for over a decade or two before I took it with me to Seoul one year and uncovered its brilliance. Re-reading is even more rewarding, and the book is littered with Post-it-notes so I can return to sentences and insightful descriptions of human motivation and character. Wow. It’s a grand love story with the backdrop of a post-war Britain, two beautiful orphaned colonial sisters and the men in their lives.

I share a passion for cold-water swimming with Kiwi author Paddy Richardson and I waited with anticipation for her new book By the Green of Spring. From my home, I look out towards Matiu Somes Island and some years ago I read Live Bodies by Maurice Gee. I enjoyed the historical details of the men interned on Somes but loved even more the post war lives in Blackball.

 

              

 

Most recently, on a road trip to the West Coast, in a Reefton bookshop I found Fay Weldon’s Leader of the Band, and I laughed uproariously at this crazy, sexy romp of a book. Sometimes it feels as though you will never catch up with all the amazing books that are written in New Zealand, let alone international authors. It was a treat to fossick and find a gem like this.

 

 

Baring our fangs

Bryan Walpert on the books he read in 2022

 

In Less, the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by American writer Andrew Sean Greer—one of the books I’ve read most recently, at the suggestion of my sister—the protagonist, Arthur Less, teaches a writing course he calls Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein. This is not a course about horror writing. Rather, it is ‘based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts.’

 

 

My own reading can be a bit vampire-ish, and though he overstates a bit, I tend to agree with Arthur Less (or perhaps it’s Greer) that many writers do read partly for instruction and permission (many readers of this essay will be writers, I presume). Not that I don’t also read like, well, a reader—I get happily sucked into plot and character. But the reader experience and the writer experience occur in parallel. That is, I am often at just a bit of distance as I observe the wires and strings, as interested in what I can learn from how the book works at the level of technique as I am in the journey it takes me on.

It is with this admission of such literary blood-sucking that, at the kind request of the powers-that-be at the Academy of New Zealand Literature, I have pulled together some thoughts on a year of reading. Since I don’t have room to discuss a large number of the books I’ve read this year (and no one would read it), I’ll use my vampiric reader tendencies as a central motif to mention just a few. Less is more. These are not necessarily new books (Less won its prize in 2018—there’s now a sequel I’ve yet to read called Less is Lost); they’re just books I’ve read, or finally read, over the past year.

 

 

One pattern becomes clear—an interest in how literary fiction can employ speculative elements. (I did the same in my novel Entanglement, and have an ongoing interest in links between science and literature in poetry as well, so perhaps this is not surprising.) Some will argue that there is, or should be, no distinction between literary and genre fiction. I take the argument, but I’m always more intrigued by the effort to create distinctions rather than the effort to elide them. (Both are worthwhile pursuits; which you choose is a matter of character.)

 

   

 

Three of those I read with interest over the past year are Bewilderment, an ecological novel by American writer Richard Powers that has at its core the relationship between a widowed father, Theo, and his troubled young son; Sea of Tranquility, a time travel novel by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel; and The Anomaly by French writer Hervé Le Tellier, in which a plane lands after going through a storm—only for the same plane, filled with the same passengers, to land a few months later. One speculative element in Powers’ novel (which, like his more sprawling The Overstory, has ecological concerns at its heart) is a neurological feedback device that permits the anger of the narrator’s troubled son to be moderated by his late mother’s brain patterns; another is the series of life-filled planets that Theo, an astrobiologist, imagines as bedtime stories for his son. Both Mandel and Le Tellier explore the ‘simulation hypothesis’ popularised by Nick Bostrom—the idea that we are all living in a simulation created by an advanced civilisation.

 

     

 

In each case, the speculative elements, though fun, point away from themselves towards issues of emotional and philosophical interest: Can we learn to look beyond ourselves and extend empathy to the world itself? That is what starts to happen to the son in Powers’ novel as his mothers’ brain patterns imprint on his and he becomes deeply concerned about the earth. As the poet Tracy K. Smith put it in a review of the book in the The New York Times: Bewilderment ‘invites us to ponder not only our dominance of the planet and the ways that the unjust power of a few dominates the lives of others. It also insists we ponder this: At what cost do we allow our capacities for fear, jealousy and appetite to trounce other equally intrinsic capacities, like empathy, courage and forbearance?’ And of course the imagined planets are used toward emotional ends—for Theo to soothe and bond with his son—rather than truly speculative ones.

Empathy is at the heart, too, of Mandel’s novel. Central to the time travel is a question of whether to break rules and sacrifice yourself for others. But in hers and Le Tellier’s another might be this: What does it mean to be ‘real’ and how important is ‘reality’ to a life well-lived? To quote another review (by novelist Laird Hunt) from The New York Times: ‘Mandel is interested in something other than limning the highs and lows of timeline trotting’; rather, the novel is ‘an attempt to make some sense of huge societal and existential crises and pose good old questions like what does it mean to be alive.’ As such the technology itself—the science—plays the role of lens, rather than focus, putting her book, as the reviewer put it, ‘more in common with tech-minimized sci-fi outings’ like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

 

 

Le Tellier’s The Anomaly is much more playful in its tone and form (it’s written—self-consciously, I think—like a Netflix series) and in its metafictional elements (a character is writing a novel called, naturally, The Anomaly). But it poses existential questions. To cite a third review from The New York Times (by Sarah Lyall—can you tell I’ve recently gotten a subscription?): the novel’s plot might have been borrowed from The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, ‘but it movingly explores urgent questions about reality, fate and free will. If our lives might not be our own and we end up dying either way, how should we live?’ In sum, it is how these writers engage with speculative elements as a sort of lens on these questions—rather than, say, time travel being central mainly to plot, no matter how heart-stopping, or simply fascinating it itself (though I’m a sucker for that as well)—that interests me in these books.

The other technique that came up surprisingly often this year in my reading is how the writer helps us to see things about the character that they can’t see or won’t admit about themselves—e.g. issues of dramatic irony and unreliability. Less is about a gay writer who cobbles together an international tour of reading and teaching to avoid attending his former partner’s wedding. Along the way he deals with aging (he turns 50 during his travels) and meditates on his own only moderate success as a writer (he is told his books aren’t gay enough). There are many pleasures in this book—it is perceptive, hilarious, and touching, and it consistently provides quotable turns-of-phrase (description of a street in New York: ‘the toothache sensation of jackhammers in concrete’). But what I observed with the most writer-reader interest is how to use humour, along with the character’s failure to fully grasp his own strengths, to invite sympathy for a character who might otherwise come across as gloomily self-involved. It is precisely the gap between what Less thinks about himself and what others perceive of him—he is more sartorially awkward than he thinks but also more talented and attractive—that, via the affectionately mocking tone, makes him so complex and likeable.

 

 

But likability of the central character isn’t in itself so important to me. Closer to home was my pleasure in reading my colleague Gigi Fenster’s novel A Good Winter, another finalist at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It’s been characterised as a ‘literary thriller,’ and the literary part, for me, is the way Fenster gradually reveals the difference between how Olga sees herself—helpful, protective—and her true motivations for playing an increasingly prominent role in the life of her friend, Lara. If Greer crafts the perception gap in the third person, in Fenster’s book the first-person narration feeds my growing distrust of the narrator’s reliability.

The book opens with a kind of summary: ‘It was a good winter. I’m not ashamed to say it. For me it was a good winter. And for Lara even. I don’t care what anyone says. The facts spoke for themselves.’ Every sentence of that paragraph is deftly crafted to be taken quite differently if reread after the gap between Olga’s perceptions and reality widens.

Farther again from home (though the author in a bio says he lives part-time in New Zealand) are the novels Darke and Darke Matter by British rare book dealer, Booker Prize judge and retired academic Rick Gekoski, who published Darke, his first novel, in his early 70s. The protagonist, James Darke, is in some ways, or at least to some readers, unlikeable. Here is an example of his personality from Darke, when the character is looking for a ‘handyman’: ‘Most builders, handy or otherwise, are incompetent, indolent and venal.’ He goes on about his rules for interacting with builders: ‘I do not provide endless cups of PG Tips with three sugars, ta, nor do I engage in talk, small or large. Preferably no visits to my WC, though a builder who does not pee is rare. Tea makes pee. But if that is necessary, only in the downstairs cloakroom. Afterwards there will be piss under the loo.’

 

     

 

But the capacity for deep love and a sense of integrity lie beneath his stream of critiques and invective. The way that Gekoski creates that complexity, by having Darke unwilling to acknowledge his better angels, is masterful. Whether Dark is ultimately likeable or not is less interesting than how Gekoski manages Darke’s characterisation. In an interview, Gekoski said he found the debate over whether the character was likeable ‘a bore,’ adding, ‘The readers who loved Darke focused on the prose and thinking, rather than on whether they liked him.’ I can’t help but wonder whether disproportionately represented among such readers are writers, like you and me, donning our cloaks and baring our fangs in the dark.

 

 

 

 

The stories they brought us

Fiona Kidman on the books she read in 2022

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Late last year I spent some time in residence as the Irish Writing Studies Fellow at Otago University. Overall, it was a year of getting to know and understand my Irish heritage better. That has carried on into 2022 and much of my reading has been centred around Irish writers and writing. Not entirely new, for I’ve kept Seamus Heaney’s Collected Works beside my bed for years and soak up contemporary Irish novelists and short story writers as fast as new books appear. Still, there’s been special pleasure in two books this year, Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Ireland unfurled. O’Toole is a distinguished Dublin-born journalist who writes for the Guardian and The New York Times. His book examines Ireland’s history from the year of his birth in 1958, each year ranging back and forth through the many and deep extremes of Irish nationhood.

 

 

Because Ireland has become, for the most part, a shining example of how an economy and a society should run, the reality, within living memory, of an impoverished, uneducated, badly housed people, its rural inhabitants often living in hovels hewn out of hillsides, is difficult to conceive. Yet O’Toole takes us from one era to another in fluid, absorbing strokes throughout a very big book. It’s part memoir and often reads like a novel. He doesn’t shy away from once taboo topics, acknowledging the hideous past of the Magdalene Laundries where girls and young women were effectively incarcerated by the church when giving birth to children conceived out of wedlock. Nor does he glamourise the IRA’s brutal history during the Troubles, as savage in its way as that of its Protestant counterparts. On 7 August 1979, O’Toole writes, ‘the IRA had what it would always regard as their best day. At Mullaghmore, on the Sligo coast, it murdered a seventy-nine-year-old man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and an eighty-three-year-old woman. The ground for these executions (the word the IRA itself used) was that the old man, Louis Mountbatten, was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth.’

 

 

If that was a big book, Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a very slim, very powerful one, an evocation of those shameful birthing practices of which O’Toole writes so eloquently. Keegan has occupied a special place in my reading experience, ever since I came across her magnificent short story collection Walk the Blue Fields. She is the author, too, of Foster, on which the recent lovely movie The Quiet Girl is based. This new novella centres round Bill Furlong, a wood and coal merchant, faced one Christmas with his own history of loss, contemplating the desires of his over-reaching family of women who all want far too much of the occasion. When he encounters an abandoned girl, punished by nuns for grieving over her lost baby, he makes a profoundly moral choice. You find your heart riven, or mine was. Keegan and I, along with Edna O’Brien, share the same Paris publisher in translation, and I hope some day I will meet these writers in person to tell them how much their work has meant to me.

My fellowship got me thinking about writers of Irish descent in New Zealand Aotearoa, the number of us whose parents came on boats a long time ago, and the stories they brought us, their children. Much of my year has been spent writing essays that explore this theme, linking up a common experience. I’ve written about Dan Davin, Eileen Duggan, Maurice Duggan and others, as well as my own background, lived through my father’s immigration; one of these essays appears in a new book of mine, published last March, called So far, for now. These descendants keep busy. My New Zealand fiction title of the year (although I still have a stack of new titles to go) is Vincent O’Sullivan’s Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques , the title story a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein. And the Cuba Press acknowledged the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses with a collection of small stories called Breach of All Size (ed. Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni), inspired by phrases from Ulysses. I was one of thirty-six contributors, along with writers like Lloyd Jones, Paula Morris, Becky Manawatu, Apirana Taylor, Emer Lyons, and Tracey Slaughter.

 

                                               

 

Was there anything else I loved this past rapid year? Well, yes. For sheer indulgence, French Braid by American writer Anne Tyler. At first, I thought it light, but that is an illusion. This family saga of ordinary people, simply doing their best, captured me.  Tyler and I are of an age and she’s been rewarding me as a reader for close to sixty years. For which I can but raise a Christmas glass and pay homage. She gives me heart, she gives me hope.

 

Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

1. Eddy, Eddy by Kate De Goldi (Allen & Unwin)

A funny and often moving coming-of-age story about an orphaned teenage boy, who lives with his librarian uncle in Christchurch, after he’s expelled from school and sets up a dog-minding business. Read an interview with Kate about her life and the novel, here.

 

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1. Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin)

This popular memoir is ‘complex, thrilling and raw’ and ‘the opposite of comfort reading,’ writes Rachael King. ‘At the heart of this book is a revelation about lines of women in families, and trauma, and how it has the potential to repeat. In fiction, in myth, we’d say we are doomed to repeat it’. Read the full review on Reading Room.

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Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

 

 

FICTION

 

 

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Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

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For the week ending 5 June 2022

 

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3. How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid (Penguin/PRH)

The first novel by multimedia talent AKA Jessica Hansell is the story of three friends surviving a long, hot Auckland summer. This is not so much a novel, Angelique Kasmara writes in Kete, but ‘more novella in volume and a connector between the genre-dissolving anarchy of zine culture and more traditional literary work.’ Read her full review here.

 

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4. Landfall 243 edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press)

There’s poetry here, creative nonfiction and visual art as well as fiction in the latest Landfall, New Zealand’s oldest literary journal. This issue features includes work by Vincent O’Sullivan, David Eggleton, Emma Neale, Janis Freegard, Tim Upperton, Erik Kennedy and Rebecca Hawkes, and celebrates Auckland writer Ruby Macomber, winner of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Read an extract from her essay at Kete.

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5. Slow Down, You’re Here by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson)

A much-anticipated new novel from Gnanalingam, this one set in Ōnehunga and on Waiheke Island, exploring a marriage in trouble. A ‘thriller that is unerring in its gaze and breathtakingly assured in its ability to show just how precarious our world really is,’ Clare Mabey writes in the Spinoff.

 

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3. I Am Autistic by Chanelle Moriah (Allen & Unwin)

Another return to the chart for this interactive guide to understanding autism, written for autistic people and their families, friends and workmates. Listen to Chanelle discuss the book’s kaupapa and success on Nine to Noon.

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4. How to be a Bad Muslim by Mohamed Hassan (Penguin)

A poetry finalist at last year’s Ockham NZ Book Awards, Hassan is now the author of a collection of rich, astute essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration and language. Read an extract from the book here.

 

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Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

 

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3. Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)

The dark horse on the Acorn Prize fiction list this year is a ‘beautiful, stylistically adventurous and deeply philosophical work,’ Angelique Kasmara writes in her ANZL review. ‘Walpert has a screenwriter’s eye for foreshadowing and payoff, with the three narrative strands braiding together to form a Möbius strip, seams eventually dissolving.’ Read her full review here.

 

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Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

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For the week ending 22 May 2022

 

 

FICTION

 

1. Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia)

Another week at the top for the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards. A subversive, imaginative re-framing of the myth of the monster bird woman, Kurangaituku is also an audacious structural feat that can be read from the front or the back cover. Hereaka has ruled all media this week, including TV, radio and the front cover of Canvas magazine in the weekend Herald. This interview with Steve Braunias appears on Reading Room.

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2. Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (VUP)

The winner of the Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at the Ockhams continues its strong run in the charts. Charlotte Grimshaw describes Reilly’s exuberant debut as part of ‘the great, joyous tradition of dramatic comedies.’ Read her full review here.

 

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3. How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid (Penguin/PRH)

The first novel by multimedia talent AKA Jessica Hansell is the story of three friends surviving a long, hot Auckland summer. This is not so much a novel, Angelique Kasmara writes in Kete, but ‘more novella in volume and a connector between the genre-dissolving anarchy of zine culture and more traditional literary work.’ Read her full review here.

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4. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (HarperCollins)

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the U.K., this is an exploration of inheritance, desire and forgiveness, it’s the ‘blisteringly funny’ story of tall, blonde, and brilliant Martha’ set from the mid 90s to 2017, ‘as she navigates life with an undiagnosed mental illness, Josie Shapiro writes on Read Close.

 

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5. In Amber’s Wake by Christine Leunens (Bateman)

A return to the chart for the latest novel from the author of Caging Skies—adapted into Taika Waititi’s film Jojo Rabbit. It’s set in 1980s’ Auckland, Cambridge and Antarctica, taking in the Springbok Tour, protests against nuclear testing in the Pacific, and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Read Stephanie Johnson’s review here.

 

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NON FICTION

 

 

1. The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage)

Noelle McCarthy’s memoir Grand is currently reprinting, so a different memoir takes its place at the top—the memoir sensation of 2021, in fact. Grimshaw’s frank and challenging memoir is a ‘fascinating portrait of not only a family, but the writing process. How we magpie material (go and make a story out of it) and what we build from it—and at whose expense?’ Read Rachael King’s full review here.

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2. Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and NZ History by Joanna Kidman, Vincent O’Malley, Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis (BWB)

Five researchers, some from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, travel to sites of conflict and contestation to explore issues of loss and memory. Read an extract from the book at e-tangata.

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3. NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women by Qiane (Qiane + Co)

An Illustrated Nonfiction finalist at the Ockham NZ Book Awards, this beautiful book combines photography and first-person testimony to showcase indigenous women making a difference in politics, healthcare, business, education, sport and the arts. Read an interview about the multi-year project with Qiane at te ao Māori News.

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4. Tumble by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press)

The winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Award at the Ockham NZ Book Awards weaves myth, history and story. ‘The collection’s poems navigate the death of Aeschylus, a journey to the underworld and Viking raids, as well as the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the public persona of Margaret Thatcher,’ writes Sophie van Waardenberg. Read her full review here.

 

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5. Super Model Minority by Chris Tse (Auckland University Press)

The buoyant third collection of poetry by Chris Tse makes a welcome return to the chart. ‘Its poems take inspiration and language from Chinese-American poet Chen Chen, Aotearoa artist and poet Sam Duckor-Jones, Carly Rae Jepsen, George Michael, the Cards Against Humanity game and a bounty of other artists and musicians. Amongst the poems’ cultural references are mall cops, Korean soap operas and Girls Aloud.’ Read Sophie van Waardenberg’s full review.

 

Time Out Books: NZ Bestsellers

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For the week ending 15 May 2022

 

 

FICTION

 

1. Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia)

And the winner is … Hereaka took home $60,000 last week as the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards. A subversive, imaginative re-framing of the myth of the monster bird woman, Kurangaituku is also an audacious structural feat that can be read from the front or the back cover. Hereaka has ruled all media this week, including TV, radio and the front cover of Canvas magazine in the weekend Herald. This interview with Steve Braunias appears on Reading Room.

 

2. How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid (Penguin/PRH)

A second week on the chart for the multimedia talent AKA Jessica Hansell. The story of three friends surviving a long, hot Auckland summer, this is not so much a novel, Angelique Kasmara writes in Kete, but ‘more novella in volume and a connector between the genre-dissolving anarchy of zine culture and more traditional literary work.’ Read her full review here.

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3. Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (VUP)

This novel was the winner of the Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at last week’s Ockhams, making Reilly only the fourth Maori writer this century to take this particular prize: the others are Paula Morris (Queen of Beauty, 2003), Kelly Ana Morey (Bloom, 2004) and Becky Manawatu (Auē, 2020). Charlotte Grimshaw describes Reilly’s exuberant debut as part of ‘the great, joyous tradition of dramatic comedies.’ Read her full review here.

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4. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (HarperCollins)

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the U.K., this is an exploration of inheritance, desire and forgiveness, it’s the ‘blisteringly funny’ story of tall, blonde, and brilliant Martha’ set from the mid 90s to 2017, ‘as she navigates life with an undiagnosed mental illness, Josie Shapiro writes on Read Close.

 

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5. Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)

This was the dark horse on the Acorn Prize fiction list this year, a clever and demanding novel that seemed overlooked by readers compared with the more straightforward stories in contention. A ‘beautiful, stylistically adventurous and deeply philosophical work, Angelique Kasmara writes in her ANZL review. ‘Walpert has a screenwriter’s eye for foreshadowing and payoff, with the three narrative strands braiding together to form a Möbius strip, seams eventually dissolving.’ Read her full review here.

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NON FICTION

 

1. Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin)

No movement in the nonfiction chart with this popular memoir holding fast to the top spot. It’s ‘complex, thrilling and raw’ and ‘the opposite of comfort reading,’ writes Rachael King. ‘At the heart of this book is a revelation about lines of women in families, and trauma, and how it has the potential to repeat. In fiction, in myth, we’d say we are doomed to repeat it’. Read the full review on Reading Room.

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2. Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin)

Published in 2020, this compendium of one-a-week whakatauki (proverbs) continues to strike a chord. Psychiatrist Elder (Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi) discusses happiness, leadership and community. Elder talks about scientific and cultural knowledge in this interview.

 

 

3. The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage)

The memoir sensation of 2021 was fancied as a winner at the Ockhams, but had to make way for Vincent O’Malley’s lauded history Voices from the New Zealand Wars. Grimshaw’s frank and challenging memoir is a ‘fascinating portrait of not only a family, but the writing process. How we magpie material (go and make a story out of it) and what we build from it — and at whose expense?’ Read Rachael King’s full review here.

 

4. Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Lucy Mackintosh (BWB)

It lost the Illustrated Nonfiction category at the Ockham NZ Book Awards to Clare Regnault’s Dressed, but this thoughtful visual stunner continues to disprove the belief that Aucklanders aren’t interested in books about their own city. Shifting Grounds explores the deep histories of three iconic landscapes: Pukekawa (the Domain), Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) and the Ōtuataua Stonefields at Ihumātao. Anna Rankin’s review for Metro includes photography by Haru Sameshima.

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5. Imagining Decolonisation by Biance Elkington, Moana Jackson, Rebecca Kiddle, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton, Amanda Thomas (BWB)

This landmark collection of essays was first published in May 2020, and almost two years on it remains essential reading on history, tikanga, law, politics, our Pacific relationships and envisaging the future. The great Moana Jackson died in March: read some reflections on his legacy at e-tangata.