Monday, 15 April 2019
Saturday, 13 April 2019
BOOKS @ VOLUME #123 (13.4.19)
Read our reviews, find out about new and short-listed books and about our Book of the Week, use the Ockhameter (find out what it is), enter competitions, find out about upcoming events and book launches, save the date for the 2019 VOLUME Mapua Literary Festival. Just for starters.
 | Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza When Maria Gainza was a child, she suffered from diplopia, or double vision, and, to correct this, used an optical apparatus which required her to concentrate on the images and “use [her] eye muscles to bring them together, pulling them both into the middle so that one lay on top of the other.” Each chapter in Gainza’s book Optic Nerve operates similarly: a thematic strand from her own life, generally an aspect of it that troubles her, is presented in parallel with an account of aspects of the life of a painter, the two strands brought into alignment through Gainza’s viewing of a work of art which acts as an apparatus that enables her to achieve an emotional depth of field that had hitherto eluded her. The lives of the writer and the artists whose works she considers are ordinary lives, but this art-viewing, so to call it, correlates experience and enables something that could be called meaning. Effective art “reformulates the questionwhat is it about? to what am I about?” Looking at something is always more about the looking than the thing, is always more about the relation between the viewer and the thing than about the thing, the object whose passivity acts as a mirror for the active (or, ideally, activated) viewer. Gainza says, of viewing Courbet’s ‘Stormy Sea’, “When you stand before it, art disappears and something else rushes in: life, in all its tempestuousness,” the life of the viewer herself. Each chapter deals with an unsettled aspect of Gainza’s (or “Gainza”’s) life: her relationships with her parents, her brother, her daughter, her friends and not-so-friends, her health, her husband’s health. In two chapters she addresses herself in the second person, in the chapter about her fraught relationship with her mother and in the chapter in which she describes the occasion on which her anxiety about flying reached the point at which she was no longer able to fly, instances in which a first person narration would still be too uncomfortable for her. Finding herself limited to viewing art that can be found in Buenos Aires, where she lives, she realises that she is not in any case addicted to art-sensation. But “maybe,” she tells herself, “you’ve just convinced yourself, in line with your progressive and alarming tendency to limit your own means, that big planes and great art are unnecessary.” Change and understanding can only be achieved by indirect means, insight can only be gained by an indirect gaze, a gaze directed in Gainza’s case at a work of art. On viewing a work by Toulouse-Lautrec, she says, “There were horses in it. Even now, that is what strikes me first, and the first thing that drops away,” and it is perhaps this dropping away of sensation that allows connections to be made across elements between which sensation was a barrier as much as a means of access. Looking at a reproduction of a work by Rothko in her doctor’s waiting room, once the sensation drops away she finds the work “gives me a feeling of my singularity: a clear sense of the brutal solitude of this slab of sweating flesh that is me.” The final chapter reveals the anxiety that underlies and gives impetus to the whole project of Optic Nerve, the crisis prefigured by concerns and details in earlier sections, or at least resonating with these concerns and details, the crisis for which Gainza’s correlation of her own life with those of others through viewing art somehow provides her with the capacity to face and accept. “I suppose it’s probably always the way,” she writes. “You write one thing in order to talk about something else.” |
>> Read Stella's review.
>>All about the book (in French).
>> My Pictures After the Storm is also a large amount of fun.
>> Le bureau des papas perdus.
>> Les petits kiwis.
>> We have a copy of Encyclopedia of Grannies to give away, courtesy of Gecko Press. To go in the draw, e-mail us and tell us an anecdote about a grandmother.
 | Encyclopedia of Grannies by Éric Veillé Here’s a book for every babushka, yaya, farmor, lola and kuia (respectively Russian, Greek, Danish, Filipino and Maori). Go to page five and you’ll find an assortment of other names for grandmothers. Touted as the first of its kind, Eric Veillé’s Encyclopedia of Grannies is a must for every discerning grandparent and grandchild (hint hint) - this would be a great present for “Grand” Mother’s Day! Quirky and full of great facts about grannies, this is sure to exercise the imagination, be a good talking point, and show the reader that grannies come in all varieties (shapes, sizes, ages, types) from the wildly leaping energetic gran on the cover (hold on kids!) to those who need a ‘throne’ for their weary bones. And their hair - well, its anything they wish it to be. “Most grannies do whatever they like with their hair. And quite right.” And one thing we are told, that they share in common, is time: time to be tempted by a cream bun, time to give cuddles, time to give the table a quick wipe, and time to get names muddled up. Grannies are wise, especially when they eating out in the treetops (Veillé’s text and illustrations create fun and hilarious juxtapositions), and grannies have their own special vocabulary (some of which is rather quaint). My favourite page is ‘Inside’: see a granny and her insides, with illustrations of the girl she was. “Inside every granny, there’s a small house, and in that house is that same granny when she was a little girl.” The book is dotted with questions from children: Why do grannies always tell us to speak up? Do grannies only ever knit cardigans? Do all grannies like nature walks? And where are those busloads of grannies going? All is revealed with the jaunty text and even more in the excellent and funky drawings. It’s not just fun and games, though: there’s also a page dedicated to moods and feelings. “Sometimes a granny feels like a lump of old mashed potato”. On this page, there are some hints about how you can cheer up a granny: draw her a chicken, put her hair in pigtails, give her drops of rain from a country where it doesn’t rain, or tell her a secret. And of course, there is a whole spread dedicated to her travels and to sending her postcards! And there’s a cat on every page to show you the way and to make comment in the way only cats can. Plenty of fun for the young, as well for every granny, nana, nonna, abuela, nainai and jida. Enjoyable. |
Friday, 12 April 2019
NEW RELEASES
"I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles. How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland?"
"Sinéad Gleeson has changed the Irish literary landscape, through her advocacy for the female voice. In Constellations, we finally hear her own voice, and it comes from the blood and bones of her body’s history. Sinéad Gleeson is an absolute force: if you want to know where passion and tenacity are born, read this book." - Anne Enright
”Constellations is a glitteringly brilliant book; daring in its voice, beautiful in its forms, challenging in its subjects. It dazzled me with its adventure and ambition. These essays stand as radiant single entities but also, over the book’s course, constellate into a larger structure of thought about what Gleeson calls ‘the story of a life in a body’. Political, poetic, tender and angry, this is a remarkable book." - Robert MacFarlane
"Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read." - Eimear McBride
>>"I have a mortality complex."
As the nineteenth century draws towards a close, Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maidservant, sets out to write her truth. She writes of the Valleys that she loves, of the poisonous rivalry between her employer's two sons and of a terrible choice which tore her world apart. Her story brings to life a period of strife and rapid social change, and evokes the struggles of those who lived in poverty and have been forgotten by history. In this fictional found memoir, novelist Alice Jolly uses the astonishing voice of Mary Ann to recreate history as seen from a woman's perspective and to give joyful, poetic voice to the silenced women of the past.
Long-listed for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
>> Excerpt.
Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as 'On the Concept of History' and The Arcades Project. Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called "the soul of the commodity."
In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's 25-year-old son, Carl, died in an accident. This poetic and affecting book is about losing a child. It is about formulating a vocabulary to express the deepest kind of pain, and it's about finding a way to write about a reality invaded by grief, lessened by loss. Faced with the sudden emptiness of language, Aidt finds solace in the anguish of Joan Didion, Nick Cave, C.S. Lewis, Mallarmé, Plato, and other writers who have suffered the deadening impact of loss. Their torment suffuses with her own. This palimpsest of mourning enables Aidt to turn over the pathetic, precious transience of existence and articulates her greatest fear: to forget.
"Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is." - Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny
5000 years ago, Britain was part of mainland Europe, connected from its east coast by an area of land referred to as Doggerland. Blackburn's remarkable book picks at threads leading back to prehistory, both via archaeology and deep cultural memory, and also at threads leading back through her own life and that of her deceased husband, a Dutch painter.
Why is Munch's work as powerful (if not more powerful) today as it was when it was painted? Knausgård prises open (or reconstructs (or constructs)) the painter and reflects on what it means to create, to be an artist, to be aware, to respond to place and situation. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgård visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer.
>>On spending too much money on an artwork and feeling filled with shame.
>> An interview.
Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
Long-listed for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
>> Antrobus was in New Zealand for last year's LitCrawl.
>> Read a sample.
"The title poem of Islander is an essential definition: not rooted in landlocked blood and soil but connected by sea and distance, and the returning tides of Scotland, the archipelagos of New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Here is a poet never given to the common gestures of banal defiance but simply slipping away from the traps of rigidity and subscription, attuned to the ancient laws of movement and sensitive to the uncertainties, the vulnerable truths. ‘Interislander’ takes a specific urgency, a man suffering a heart attack on the ferry between the North Island and the South Island: practicalities and actions demanded of the moment are deftly depicted but the human place in our unfinished history is there between the sea beneath and the enveloping sky above. ‘The Desert Road’ crosses the country, mapped by co-ordinate points, listening as the darkness falls and languages come out in constellations, leading through the wilderness to strange, ‘familiar places’. ‘The inbreath’ takes us to Ardbeg and another waterside with slipstreams and shipping lanes, snow in the mouth and Scotland as no more nor less than another harbour of perception. Lynn Davidson is a poet opening such perceptions and sensitivities, singular, sometimes wittily anecdotal, poised upon latent gravity, eluding both flippancy and weight in a collection that slows time and repays patience with tempered inductions to particular, opening perspectives." —Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
After their mother Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, teenagers Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success. The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father's affection, but soon Mae and Edie's close relationship begins to fall apart - Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother's downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne's romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.
"Dark and unforgettable." - Kirkus
Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalised ways of eating. Our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time.
'Thoughtful and intelligently observed. Evans's delicate prose weaves issues of racial identity and politics into the narrative so that they never feel heavy-handed. A deftly observed, elegiac portrayal of modern marriage, and the private – often painful – quest for identity and fulfilment in all its various guises." – Observer
"A novel that lays bare the normality of black family life in suburban London, while revealing its deepest psyche, its tragedies, its hopes and its magic. A wondrous book." - Afua Hirsch
Now in paperback. Listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
>> The author on losing her twin.
Collingwood Ingram, known as 'Cherry' for his defining obsession, was born in 1880 and lived until he was a hundred, witnessing a fraught century of conflict and change. After visiting Japan in 1902 and 1907 and discovering two magnificent cherry trees in the garden of his family home in Kent in 1919, Ingram fell in love with cherry blossoms, or sakura, and dedicated much of his life to their cultivation and preservation. On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to see the loss of local cherry diversity, driven by modernisation, neglect and a dangerous and creeping ideology. A cloned cherry, the Somei-yoshino, was taking over the landscape and becoming the symbol of Japan's expansionist ambitions. The most striking absence from the Japanese cherry scene, for Ingram, was that of Taihaku, a brilliant 'great white' cherry tree. A proud example of this tree grew in his English garden and he swore to return it to its native home. Multiple attempts to send Taihaku scions back to Japan ended in failure, but Ingram persisted. Over decades, Ingram became one of the world's leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura internationally.
Poems balancing artistic experimentation with frank expression and describing a New Zealand that is overlapped by the United States and the challenges and almost-joys of navigating between these places, identities and homecomings.
>>Interview with NLB.
For more than fifty years, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, and exposed Nazi war criminals, tracking them down in places as far-flung as South America and the Middle East. They uncovered the notorious Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon," in Bolivia. They outed Kurt Lischka as chief of the Gestapo in Paris, the man responsible for the largest deportation of French Jews. And, with the help of their son, Arno, they brought the Vichy police chief Maurice Papon to justice. They were born on opposite sides of the Second World War. Beate's father was in the Wehrmacht, while Serge's father was deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew.
In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream.
"Muscle unfolds like a series of Russian dolls, each more Beckettian, winding and wonderful than the one before. Compelling enough to read in one gulping go." - Daisy Johnson
"Rare and accomplished - it teases out classic noir riffs and set-ups but in a language sinuous enough, and with invention ripe enough, to make them feel new." - Kevin Barry
In 1967 Sergeant Pepper transformed the way recorded music was presented - no longer were records just a collection of songs but rather a shaped entity in itself.
Profiles twenty-two of the gifted and self-destructive talents in rock history. From Brian Wilson to Syd Barrett, the Rolling Stones to Neil Young, Iggy Pop to Lou Reed, this title offers portraits that are unimaginable in the world of market driven music business.
"A genius wordsmith, Kent is the man who has lived rock'n'roll to the full. The Dark Stuff contains some of the best music journalism ever written." - Spectator
An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.
A blackly comic novel about lies, love, Lagos, and how blood is thicker - and more difficult to get out of the carpet - than water.
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the fit doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.
Long-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them.
30 years' work. 400 pages.
Represents the full arc of this outstanding Southern poet of place.
Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.
"This systemic perversion of science and its method might the most obvious instance of the corruption O'Mahoney describes, but he casts his net much wider. He also considers, inter alia, the invention of pseudo-diseases, the connivance of the editors of medical journals in increasing the volume of papers, an uncritical deference to the simplifications of statistically-derived knowledge, and the dishonesty of failing to acknowledge the limits of what medicine can reasonably be expected to achieve." - Literary Review
The boy does not speak. The boy has no name. The boy, raised half-wild in the forests of southern France, sets out alone into the wilderness and the greater world beyond. Without experience of another person aside from his mother, the boy must learn what it is to be human, to exist among people, and to live beyond simple survival. As this wild and naive child attempts to join civilisation, he encounters earthquakes and car crashes, ogres and artists, and, eventually, all-encompassing love and an inescapable war.
Winner of the 2016 Prix Femina.
Explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages. The Braided River presents migration as a lifelong experience that affects everything from language, home, work, family and friendship to finances, citizenship and social benefits.
An exclusive glimpse into the gardens of the world's leading restaurants - and access to innovative recipes inspired by them.
Journeying across the continents, writer Matt Collins and photographer Roo Lewis tie together both the historical context and modern-day applications of some of the world's most fascinating and iconic trees. They explore the heritage of woodlands from around the world and meet those whose lives are inexplicably bound to them. The book is divided into 10 main chapters, each of which explores a tree from a particular genus - Pine, Juniper, Oak, Hornbeam, Cherry, Beech, Birch, Chestnut, Douglas-fir and Poplar. Beautifully presented.
The popular Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland has been serving devoted regulars for decades, but behind the staff’s professional masks simmer tensions, heartaches and grudges from decades of gruelling service work. When Duck House manager Jimmy Han tries to sell his father’s old restaurant to move to a more upscale location, these conflicts are set loose, testing the bonds of this working family and they must finally confront the conflicts and loyalties simmering beneath the red and gold lanterns.
Listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
>> Read a sample.
Monday, 8 April 2019
Find out about the books short-listed for each category in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (read the judges' citations below). Click through to reserve your copies from our website. Use the OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourites and to win books.
Use the Ockhameter to vote for the books you think should win each section of the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (or, alternatively, for the books you think will win each section of the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards).
Click on the horse to vote.
All entries go the draw to win a copy of each of the four winning books. Entries close 10 May.
ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE
The New Ships moves deftly back and forth in time and place as Peter Collie, his life eroding after the loss of his wife, tries to make sense of the past and find a way forward. With ageing parents, a flailing relationship with his son, and a past tragedy, the strata of life and family are excavated and entwined with ideas of art and literature to produce an intriguing and elegantly written novel with a wide cast of memorable characters and not a word out of place.
Lloyd Jones has delivered a dark but clear-eyed parable of who and what we become when supposedly decent societies master the art of ‘othering’. The narrator’s intense specificity in detailing the two captive strangers’ processes and behaviours, without any seeming emotional context, allows the book to become quietly horrific, the banality of its evil played out as studious observation. It is a courageous book in its insistence upon not directly engaging with its seeming lack of humanity. But the cumulative effect is that its chilling images and their implications do just that.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Spare, unsentimental and unforgettable, This Mortal Boy is a masterful recreation of the events leading up to the real-life hanging of “jukebox killer” Albert Lawrence (Paddy) Black at Mount Eden prison in 1955. With seemingly effortless proficiency, Kidman creates an intensely human and believable story as she positions Paddy, newly arrived from Ireland, within the moral panic of post-war New Zealand, the restless vulnerability of Auckland’s teen culture and the damning preconceptions of the legal profession, all leading to the appalling inevitability of his death.
All This by Chance is a remarkably immersive three-generational family saga revealing the persistence of a wartime past on our personal histories and the undeniability of traumatic memory. In rich, often intense prose Vincent O’Sullivan weaves the dramatic tension of his story through time and place, from a German concentration camp and post-war London to Italy, Greece, Africa and New Zealand, all the while holding his characters to the unbreakable thread that binds them to the impossible demands of the Holocaust.
>> Read Stella's review.
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Helen Heath’s collection, by turns thoughtful and moving, asks how the material world, including technology, might mediate – or replace – human relationships. The experimental first half uses found poems to engage how artifacts – sex dolls, buildings – become objects of human passion. The elegiac second half offers a touching speculative narrative: a woman embeds her deceased partner’s personality into software to avoid letting go. The question Heath suggests is perhaps less whether friends are electric and more whether they can, or should be.
Erik Kennedy’s frequently playful book offers intellectual and aesthetic surprises, not least of which in the way it moves beyond its ironic mode to at times vulnerable meditations on politics, family, relationships and the self. The collection is notable for experiments in structure and prosody, weaving the contemporary, per the collection’s title, with updated nods to received forms such as the sonnet and rhyme. Kennedy’s frequently light tonal touch belies the difficulty of the linguistic manoeuvres it deftly performs.
Therese Lloyd’s The Facts combines ekphrasis, literary influence and the personal poem. At times darkly humorous and at others intensely uncomfortable, these poems explore a contemporary approach to the confessional lyric, interrogating emotional experience while maintaining self-awareness and a willingness to look outwards. One engaging thread in the collection is its investigation of the role of art and spirituality in relation to individual trauma and the process of healing.
Tayi Tibble’s first collection brings us fresh, bold poems that saunter and shimmy with an unsettling self-assurance through a range of uncomfortable and familiar tropes. Her words are vital on the page: skewing and renewing the dusky maiden as millennial sex kitten. Her kūpenga snares scenes that an Aotearoa audience will recognise as our own awkward, unequal, power dynamic. Her lyrical kaupapa draws us in to peer at a two-way mirror that is playful, brutal, seductive and disquieting.
>> Read Stella's review.
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION AWARD
In this powerful account of aspects of recent environmental history in Aotearoa New Zealand, the author brings together a wealth of first-hand accounts and stories to provide an important record of the individuals and groups who made commitments to forest conservation and activism. Historic illustrations and well-chosen archival materials create a sense of context for the reader, while the use of contemporary photography captures the splendour of the natural environment that the book so rightfully celebrates.
Thoughtfully designed and beautifully presented, the creators of this book about the murals made by artist E. Mervyn Taylor in the 1950s and 1960s have paid considerable attention to both content and production values and the result is impressive. The writers are diverse, the text engaging, and with the aid of well chosen illustrations the book delivers texture and context to a group of important and often overlooked public art works. It also makes a significant contribution to the broader understanding of artistic and cultural activity in mid-century New Zealand.
This striking book detailing 3000 years of Sāmoan tattooing immediately invites closer investigation as a result of its integrated approach to design, photography, typography and writing. The ambitious scope of the subject matter and the knowledge of the main authors results in an important body of new scholarship, while the texts remain clear, accessible and engaging. Invited writers add a range of perspectives and experiences appropriate to the subject and intention of the book.
This handsomely designed and elegant book offers an expanded history of the birds of Aotearoa New Zealand. The combination of text and illustrations creates a work that is detailed, wide-ranging and informative, illustrating the writer’s advanced understanding of his subject. Birdstories seamlessly brings iconic historical images together with the work of more recent artists and designers to create a volume that presents a real sense of how these birds became a feature of our visual, natural and cultural history, while reinforcing a strong conservation message.
ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
This deeply moving and often surprising story is a delight to read. Set against the backdrop of the onscreen double-act many of us will remember, Hudson & Halls conveys the humour, enduring love and drama of this couple’s public and personal relationship. Joanne Drayton’s fresh approach to storytelling highlights significant social and political moments over four decades and three countries, while the story and the book design celebrate some of the kitsch flamboyance of the pair and the period.
A fresh and evocative take on the memoir from Maurice Gee, one of New Zealand’s favourite fiction writers. Three years after the publication of a comprehensive biography, he offers his own Memory Pieces, a compelling three-part memoir exploring his parents’ relationship, his own childhood, and his Swedish-born wife Margaretha’s childhood. This well-crafted and often riveting story is told with warmth and generosity, and presented in a beautifully produced book.
Beautifully written and highly engaging, We Can Make a Life is the story of a remarkable family and their life in the South Island. Told with warmth and curiosity by an exciting new writer with a fresh and compelling voice, Chessie Henry’s powerful memoir explores her childhood, family dynamics, mental health, and the impact of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes on her family. The assuredness of the writing is complemented by the attractiveness of the book.
In this exquisitely produced book, Anna Rogers introduces us to the little-known story of New Zealand’s medical services during the Great War. Ambitious in scope, and engagingly written, all dimensions of the medical effort are covered, as are the significant challenges the doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers, ambulance drivers and pharmacists faced in treating the traumatic impacts of war on the bodies and minds of soldiers. A remarkable history told with skill, compassion and empathy.
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