If you are looking for a lovely, light and scintillating book, I can highly recommend You Are Here by David Nicholls. His name may sound familiar because he is the author of One Day, which is made into a very popular Netflix series. But don’t be fooled, You Are Here is nothing like the tragic One Day or any other love story because it is excitingly witty AND the two main characters are not young (relatively speaking). Michael is 42, bearded and a geography teacher from York. He plans to walk the 200 miles across Britain in order to distract...
Over 250 plants and fungi to forage in Aotearoa By Peter Langlands Penguin, $50 Earlier this year I wrote about Fungi of Aotearoa by Liv Sisson and mentioned the imminent publication of a ‘companion’ book: Foraging New Zealand by Peter Langlands. Peter has long been a leading expert in foraging. He has created a large, personal database of 7500 edible flora and fauna species in New Zealand. For this book he limited himself to plant-based foraging and to only 250 of our tastiest wild plants. The book starts with chapters on edible plant families listed in alphabetical order...
How to free yourself and your family from a lifetime of clutter By Margareta Magnusson Published by Scribe, $30 The book for review today is about the approach to putting your life in order so your loved ones won’t have to. There is a word for it in Swedish: döstädning, literally, ‘death cleaning’. Swedish author Margareta Magnusson is in her eighties and has experienced the importance of death cleaning when she had to move her widowed parent to a smaller home. She wants to save her own children the stress of going through drawers and boxes of meaningless...
A Handbook for Mounting Very Small Scientific Expeditions Last week I was invited to Lake Tekapo School to meet four children’s authors who were on their annual Storyline Tour. The Storylines Children’s Literature Charitable Trust of New Zealand aims to inspire children to enjoy the magic of books, especially books created for them by New Zealand writers and illustrators. One of the authors was Juliette MacIver famous for her Marmaduke Duck books. I say famous, but I wasn’t familiar with Marmaduke Duck. Well, Juliette did such an amazing performance reading Marmaduke Duck and Bernadette Bear that from now on the...
As a bookseller it is always tempting to reach for the next exciting new publication, forcing many great books from previous years to remain at the bottom of the reading pile. One such book was Small Things Like These, by Irish author Claire Keegan. This novella was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 but several locals finally convinced me to read it. I was not disappointed. The book is set in 1985 in a small Irish town. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant and lives a modest but comfortable life with his wife and five daughters. There were...
AMERICAN MOTHER, by Colum McCann with Diane Foley Bloomsbury, $38.99 The American mother of this memoir is Diane Foley, mother of American journalist James (Jim) Foley, who was kidnapped in northern Syria and murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in a video around the world. The book is written by Irish author Colum McCann who captures Diane Foley’s voice in a very authentic way. What motivated my interest in this book was that I wanted to know how a mother copes when one of her children is held in captivity in a brutal place...
