Tony Beyer Spindrift: New & selected poems by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, 2023), 240pp, $40; Residual Gleam: Selected poems & translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, 2023), 88pp, $28   Anyone who has taken an interest in New Zealand poetry during the last half-century or so is likely to have the voice of Bob Orr somewhere in the mind’s ear like a fluent soundtrack to a lifetime. From the 1970s onwards his lyrical images, expressed with elliptical terseness or rangy and colloquial eloquence, have been irreplaceable components of the scene. He is unique, too, in being acknowledge ..read more

Tim Saunders Bushline: A memoir by Robbie Burton (Potton & Burton, 2022), 257pp, $39.99 Mountain literature has a long history in this country. It is a genre enjoyed by both experienced travellers and armchair adventurers, and there is something about backcountry tales that reflects our spirit and soul. The desire to interpret our outdoor exploits is often strong. Writing about nature is really writing about the world and our place in it, and when confronted by something bigger than ourselves—mountains, lakes and forests—it is only human to want to capture it in words; to attempt to define ..read more

Giovanni Tiso John Mulgan and the Greek Left: A regrettably intimate acquaintance by C.-Dimitris Gounelas and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 368pp, $40 At the beginning of a series of lectures entitled Beyond the Frontier given at Stanford University in 1981, the British historian E.P. Thompson noted, almost apologetically, how the subject of his talks concerned ‘an event which, in terms of public history, is trivial; marginal; meriting a footnote’. He went on to add that he could not expect his audience to share his ‘own personal concern to establish the truth ..read more

Airini Beautrais How to Disappear Completely by Nicholas Sheppard (Eunoia Publishing, 2023), 190pp, $35 The lone mass shooter is a familiar figure from news media and also the focus of various works of recent fiction. He surfaces in novels such as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, published in 2003, and numerous young adult novels. He is featured in films, like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (also from 2003), and in songs, like Foster The People’s ironically upbeat, poppy ‘Pumped-Up Kicks’ (2010). It’s fair to use the pronoun ‘he’, as 97.7% of American mass shooters between 1966 and 2019 ..read more

Nod Ghosh A New Eden: Betaverse Trilogy (Book 1) by Menilik Henry Dyer (Podium, 2023), 298pp, $29; Taken by Alex Stone (Vanguard Press, 2023), 616pp, $50   Controlling and influencing others’ minds provides the premise for many a good story. Possession, brainwashing and telepathy often appear in literary pages or on screen. Science fiction additionally explores the technical manipulation of consciousness. These concepts entertain and terrify in equal measure. A New Eden and Taken feature different forms of mind invasion. These books will make you question what sentience, cognition and ide ..read more

David Eggleton Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2023), 278pp, $32.99 ‘Caroline gave a low growl. I wanted to leap on her back, flip her on the ground and roar into her unlined face.’ Lioness is a comic novel by Emily Perkins that asserts we are all driven by animal emotions over which we constantly struggle to assert rational control. The comedy is in the hyperbole of her language and in her up-to-the-minute account of our present condition, rendered as rants and harangues through the megaphone mouthpieces of a variety of characters as they clash and interact. It’s all registered i ..read more

Sarah Christie ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the making of history by Bain Attwood (Auckland University Press, 2023), 288pp, $59.99 In A Bloody Difficult Subject, Bain Attwood has taken the overlooked papers of an overlooked historian and used them as the basis for a deliberation on the historiography of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and on the act of writing New Zealand history. Ruth Guscott, later Ross, (1920–1982) was an academically trained historian who developed a strong interest in what was then known as the Treaty of Waitangi and the historic events surroundi ..read more

Stephanie Johnson The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin, 2024), 304pp, $36.99 Even readers with only a passing interest in contemporary crime fiction may have the impression that female detectives now vastly overwhelm their male counterparts. Smilla Jaspersen, Phryne Fisher and Miss Marple are possibly the best-known of these crime fighters, and women readers generally celebrate this long-evolving change. ‘Why do they all have to be women?’ a keen crime reader asked me, recently, possibly unaware of the domination of the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Maigret ..read more

Michelle Elvy Light Keeping by Adrienne Jansen (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2023), 238pp, $37.50; Secrets of the Land by Kate Mahony (Cloud Ink Press, 2023), 270pp, $29.99; The Bones of the Story by Sandra Arnold (Impspired Books, 2023), 43pp, USD$9.99 Each of these books has a sense of time passing, of impermanence. There is wreckage and survival. All of them explore questions around isolation and community. And in all of them, there is both darkness and light. Adrienne Jansen’s novel, Light Keeping, tells the story of lighthouse keeper Bill and his wife Annie and how their lives change starti ..read more

Chris Else The Waters by Carl Nixon (RHNZ Vintage, 2023), 288pp, $37 Carl Nixon is one of our most successful writers of short fiction, winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield and twice winner of Sunday Star Times short story competitions. His first collection, Fish ’n’ Chip Shop Song and other stories, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. He is also a successful playwright and the author of novels that explore the limits of convention in mystery and thriller genres. He is first and foremost a storyteller, more interested in the dramatic dimension of fiction t ..read more