Reading GOING ZERO is like binge watching ten episodes of a reality TV show, staying up late to find out if your favourite contestant is going to win. In the case of GOING ZERO, the reader will keep their fingers crossed for librarian Kaitlyn Day. The villain is billionaire tech mogul Cy Baxter who has teamed up with the CIA to beta-test a ground-breaking piece of spyware named Fusion. Ten carefully selected contestants, ‘Zeros’, have been given two hours to go off the grid and ‘Go Zero’. If they can evade detection by Fusion for 30 days, they will win...
The subtitle of Michael Rosen’s memoir is Life lessons on going under, getting over it and getting through it. If these lines sound familiar, you are right. Michael Rosen is the author of the forever popular children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. In 2020 Michael Rosen suffered severe effects from Covid and he was in coma for 40 days with doctors uncertain if he would survive. When he came home from the hospital, he was still very unwell, and this made him think about getting better: “what it means and how we do it.” In each chapter, the...
When we hear the names Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and the word Stoicism our eyes may glaze over because does it really matter what “some long-dead dudes from almost 2000 years ago have said?” In her book, REASONS NOT TO WORRY, Australian journalist Brigid Delaney has made the Stoics accessible and relatable to everyday life. She describes how she queried the Stoic principles but now uses them as a tool to regain a sense of agency and tranquillity. One of the main principles in Stoicism is to learn to determine which things in life are within our control...
The Last Guests - J.P PomareThe Last Guests is J.P Pomare’s latest book and it is phenomenal! The suspense and thrill of the story is right back up there with his debut book Call Me Evie. A newly wed couple, Lina and Cain, decided that they would rent out their holiday home in Lake Tarawera on an Air BnB like website as they don’t use it as much as they would like, and they needed some extra money. What they don’t realise is that there are people from an illegal streaming platform on the internet that are sneaking into peoples...
THE AUTHOR’S CUT by OWEN MARSHALLPenguin, $36On Thursday night, my husband and I drove home in the dark, back to Lake Tekapo after watching the movie premiere of Coming Home in the Dark in Timaru. The internationally acclaimed movie, directed by James Ashcroft is inspired by Owen Marshall’s short story of the same title: Coming Home in the Dark. He wrote this story in 1995 and it has recently been republished with a selection of twenty Owen Marshall stories in The Author’s Cut to coincide with the release of the movie.In the past I have commented on the kind, non-judgmental...
