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...
Matt Haig is an author well known for his poignant perspectives on modern life. His latest book “The Life Impossible” is no exception and is inter-woven with threads of hope, trust, acceptance and a little bit of magic. When retired teacher, Grace Winters, is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She lands in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. As soon as she arrives, she realises that the island and the people who live on it are not all as they seem. Among the...
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...
Some of you may remember Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s book written in 2009 or the 2015 movie based on this book. It’s the story about a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who leaves her Irish village to seek opportunities in Brooklyn, New York. In Tóibín’s newest book, Long Island, we meet Eilis Lacey again twenty years later. It’s 1976 and Eilis is married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers. They all live in neighbouring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives, and children and Tony’s parents. Eilis and Tony have two teenage...
