On the recommendation of a Petronella Book Club member, I picked up this book for my first new year read. A fictional reimagining of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, it is a mix of fact and fiction cleverly woven together to create a real page turner. What if the Apollo mission had failed to return from the moon? What if this epic moment in history had a completely different outcome? Using parallel versions of the true characters involved, this novel covers both the mechanical and humanistic workings of orchestrating such a momentous event and the strength...
If you are anything like me, the start of a new year is the time when you will sit down with a brand new diary and reflect, set goals and plan out what you think your year may look like. But it’s also the time when most of us will seek inspiration to help set the tone for the months ahead. Often that inspiration will come from quotes you have read, resolutions you have set or habits you want to adopt or change. This year, my inspiration has come from a James Norbury book called ‘The Cat Who Taught Zen’....
When I had the opportunity to read the second Kawai book ‘Tree of Nourishment’, I decided it was time to get educated. This book for me is my book of the year and I have read some real goodies this year! A hauntingly beautiful and powerful follow up to ‘Kawai: For such a time as this’. It's 1818 on the East Coast of New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of unprecedented...
If you are looking for a new take on the suspense thriller genre, then you will be pleasantly surprised when reading The Ledge, by Christian White. It’s a shift from the current all too popular detective storylines that seem to be filling the books shelves at the moment. Set in small town Australia, the book follows two different timelines. Now and back in the past 1999 when three teenage boys were forced to make a pact to never tell anyone..... no one can ever find out what happened. Now, human remains are found in the forest of the small...
THE FINAL DIAGNOSIS Obscure cases of death, disease & murder By Cynric Temple-Camp HarperCollins Publishers $39.99 The Final Diagnosis is the third book by Cynric Temple-Camp. The pathologist from Palmerston North covers everything from autopsies and misdiagnoses to murders and Covid. Although the stories are all true and set in New Zealand he made the stories very readable by using a semi-fictional style and a black sense of humour. In his chapter about Covid he reveals the can-do attitude of his team. With initially only three testing labs for Covid in New Zealand, the turn-around time for results...
Australian journalist and author Trent Dalton is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Boy Swallows Universe (now also a tv series on Netflix). Just like the novel’s main character Eli Bell, Dalton grew up in Brisbane in a loving but crumbling family with a junkie mother and a drug-dealing stepfather. By giving Eli a savviness that the author as a young boy never had, he created a universal story of hope. In Lola in the Mirror, Trent Dalton dives into the Brisbane underworld again. This time the main character is a nameless seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her mother...
