The Sea On Our Skin by Madeliene Tobert

 The Sea on Our Skin

This is a beautiful and haunting first novel about relationships between parents and children, about love and betrayal, and about daily life, set in a tiny Pacific Island community. The sea that Amalia regards as the boundary of her world, Ioane uses as his escape route. On one journey he takes their second small son with him – it is years before this close-knit family see him again. The building of a road opens the secluded community up a little to the outside world and strangers are now able to visit. Taking its rhythms from oral story-telling traditions, this simple, lyrical story is beguiling and transports you to a vivid & tangible island.

*Madeliene Tobert is originally from Scotland –lived in the pacific for many years, is married to a Fiiian, & now lives in Auckland.

Hachette, $37

Reviewed by Carole Beu, The Women’s Bookshop

New Perkins – due out in May 2012

The Forrests by Emily Perkins

Dysfunctional family life is given a jolt with Perkins’ new novel. The Forrests, particularly the close relationship between the sisters, Dorothy and Evelyn, will hook you. While the story is chronological, a cradle to the grave encounter, the writer’s handling of time is unusual; the story leaps in an almost lurching manner from event to event. This technique is extraordinarily successful, creating suspense and a feeling of unease which neatly fits this family’s secrets, longings, and misfortunes.

Bloomsbury 9781408809235

Reviewed by Stella Chrysostomou, Page and Blackmore

This title is not due in bookstores until May 2012. It will also be the May featured title in The Listener Book Club.

Louise Wareham Leonard reviews!

Miss Me a Lot Of by Louise Wareham Leonard

Louise Wareham Leonard’s writing is elegant and spare, reflecting the beauty, gravitas and loneliness of the characters that populate this striking novel. Holly is a young woman from a family of wealth, trying to navigate the dark undertows of attraction – the power it gives and the cost it carries – while watching her family’s beauty lay waste to those around them.

Holly must find a way through desire to love, but the egos and fantasies at play in her life, create a solitude around her she struggles to understand and dispel. Indistinct relationships, based on the bleak use of male and female power, throw up harsh obstacles. Holly’s intelligent voice captures the tension and desire of love’s formation and flaws, without cliché or angst. In this intentionally fragmented narrative Wareham Leonard charts the effects of truths both ignored and embraced, exposing what is substantial and what is hollow.

This is a beautifully crafted novel from an author with exquisite style and control. Miss Me A Lot Of is a poignant and piercing story capable of absorbing and unsettling the reader.

Reviewed by Marcus Greville of Vic Books. VUP. $30

To be in to win a copy of Miss Me A Lot Of leave a comment below this blog entry! Competition closes Tuesday 27th at midnight. The competition has now closed. 

Since You Ask, Louise Wareham Leonard’s second novel, is presented as a backwards narrative, recounted by Betsy Scott from within the confines of a mental institute whilst in conversation with her therapist. The therapy and the reason she’s incarcerated remain vague till far later in the book; a shroud of mystery is crafted from the beginning, creating a sense of unease and lack of trust that is central to the story as a whole.

A beautiful ghost of a character, Betsy is as honest as she is troubled, and her story is bold in really fragile ways. As she tells it her youth is dominated by older men, men voracious for her delicacy and beauty who want to establish themselves in her life, not caring if she loses herself in the process.

There is so much wealthy apathy and dosed up emotional disconnection here that it made me feel I was two Ativan deep.

Wareham manages to piece together a story of emotional significance using a subject matter that is so easily trashed; girls like this often just get called names and cast aside, forgotten. Very rarely are they lovingly and indulgently examined – their decisions left to unfold without preemptive judgement. A little bit like a modern Lolita but from the perspective of Lolita herself, this story drifts over significant sensual experiences and cleverly connects them to both the breakage and the fixing of Betsy Scott.

Reviewed by Lily Richards of Unity Auckland.

Tripswitch and The Changeover…

Tripswitch by Gaelyn Gordon

Gaelyn Gordon’s, at times terrifying tale, Tripswitch pitches three orphaned cousins against their evil aunt Lureene; a bludger of the system, a skeamster with evil powers and the abuser of her two twin sons; Cain and Abel.  The three girls have to harness their own power, not just against the supernatural malice of their aunt, but against the poverty she keeps them in and the truth she keeps from them. I remember this as being the first book I’d read that really scared me, that lured me in, that made me feel like I’d gone to a different, darker world. A world I couldn’t wait to return to. Great for kids aged between 12 and 15 depending on reading level.

The Changeover by Margaret Mahy

Described as a ‘coming-of-age story with an unconventional romance between an aloof and difficult boy who happens to be a male witch and a strong-willed, psychically sensitive schoolgirl’ you couldn’t have planned a plot that would have hooked my 13 year old self more thoroughly.

Magic and romance spliced with peril is the staunchest cocktail for escapist prone teenagers. There is raunch here and spook!

I remember being completely enthralled that it was set in Christchurch; the localisation of this made it real, made me think I might bump into the characters ever though I lived in Auckland. Still, higher chance than if it was set in America. And I completely fell in love with that ‘difficult boy’ who in the end helped both the protagonist and myself changeover; her to a supernatural realm, me to the world of books, which I’d decided was a more pleasurable alternative to adolescent reality.

Both reviewed by Lily Richards of Unity Auckland.

Passport to Hell!

Passport to Hell – Robin Hyde (1936)

Everything by novelist, journalist and poet Robin Hyde (born Iris Guiver Wilkinson) is essential reading. A fiercely productive and independent woman with a blazing literary talent, her stark journalistic style of writing is perhaps best illustrated in her war novel Passport to Hell. Hyde’s sharp and diagnostic realism punctuates an unsparingly brutal and graphic yet intimate account of the first World War, and is told from a front-line soldier’s perspective.

While Passport to Hell was highly praised at the time, few reviewers were aware it was written by a woman.

I’m also looking forward to the forthcoming book Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings edited by Mary Edmond Paul (due end of March).

Reviewed by Kiran Dass, Unity Books Wellington

The Scarecrow…

The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Ronald Hugh Morrieson was one of New Zealand’s most colourful literary personalities and although his work was relatively uncelebrated for some time (the family home where Morrieson wrote in Hawera was demolished to make way for a K.F.C!) all four of his novels have been made into cult films and his influence remains strong in the national imagination.

Combining gothic mystery and Dickensian characterisation, The Scarecrow is as much about the down-and-out Poindexter family as the nefarious deeds of a stranger who becomes known in Klynham (a dead ringer for Morrieson’s native Hawera) as The Scarecrow. Seen from the perspective of young Neddy Clifton “of the Poindexter ilk”, the escapades of both the people of Hawera and The Scarecrow are darkly funny and sometimes shocking, turning idealised visions of small-town Aotearoa on their heads. As the Poindexters and their community come closer to the heart of the mystery, their lives become all the more ensnared in the horrific web of The Scarecrow. Morrieson portrays with gritty realism the fabric of middle New Zealand in the 1950s and the result is a chilling piece of true New Zealand gothic with the best opening sentence since 1984.

Reviewed by Louisa Kasza at Time Out Bookstore.

To be in to win our competition leave a comment saying what you love about NZ Books!

You could win 8 x New Zealand Penguin Classics: Came a Hot Friday, The Scarecrow, Let The River Stand, Live Bodies, Mutuwhenua, Pounamu Pounamu, All Visitors Ashore, and Hang On A Minute Mate. 

Competition closes Tuesday March 20th 2012.

A very Graham Greene homage…

I loved the moral ambiguity in this Man Booker shortlisted thriller which features an ex-pat Englishman whose moral compass gets unhinged by two Russian opportunists. Set in a post-Communist Russia where the money is flowing freely and people disappear over real estate, A.D.Miller has written a very Graham Greene homage to a world of greed and corruption, where even the innocent go along for the ride.

I loved how the Russian winter was a character unto itself:  ‘After three winters in Russia I knew this was the real thing: the big chill, the ice in the air that stays till April. The white smoke from the power plant down the river was congealed against the thick night. It was still drizzling, the droplets sliding down my glasses and blurring my vision, making everything seem even more fantastical than it already did.’

As Nick narrates his story to his ‘new’ wife in London (so she can make up her mind about his character as the reader does) he outlines the scam he got caught up in. It is a portrait of a bleak and unhappy Russia and it all ends really badly – don’t let that put you off though – my sympathy lay with the naive Nick, who’s feelings for his Russian girlfriend overode what his head told him to do. An intelligent and literary thriller – highly recommended!

Snowdrops by A.D.Miller
Atlantic RRP $36.99
9781848874541
Reviewed by Nevena Nikolic, Time Out, Auckland

On Walden Pond…

Leibovitz has been impoverished lately, mired in financial troubles that the NY Times seem to feel are due to mismanagement and depression over the death of family members and her loved one, Susan Sontag. Fair enough. But $25 million?

Anyway Leibovitz has finally taken matters into her own hands and done something replenishing. Pilgrimage is her journey to places of meaning: Woolf’s cottage, Ansel Adams dark room, the paths down which Darwin walked every day. A truly extraordinary book, full of inspiration and exploration, it started as a notion between her and Sontag. It started as their collective ambition to visit the places that moved them, that beckoned not by way of paycheque but a calling to the soul.

From founding fathers to poets, sharpshooters, philosophers and authors – this collection is as erratic as it is heartfelt.

Note: I cried when I saw the images of Walden Pond. How the light hits the rubble where Thoreau once was.

Pilgrimage by Annie Leibovitz
Jonathon Cape $95
9780224096263

Reviewed by Lily Richards, Unity Auckland

Coolest stocking stuffer. Ever.

Tim Burton Playing Cards

It’s fair to say there’s not much reading here but I find it important to let you know about the existence of perhaps the coolest stocking-stuffer/gift as yet known to man. These playing cards are only $15 and come with Burton characters on the back. Each house a different set of beautiful damaged Burtonesque Halloween babies – this might just help bring cards back.

For sale at Unity Auckland. Hurry! While stocks last…

Reviewed by Lily Richards, Unity Auckland

Hug it to your heart

This is a superb non-fiction title from one of New Zealand’s most brilliant and most modest writers, Fiona Farrell from Banks Peninsular. At the time of the first Christchurch earthquake Fiona was working on a book about walking, especially in foreign countries, and the things you think about while you ramble and detour and contemplate your surroundings. Then “the quake sent a jagged tear right through my text.”

The result is The Broken Book a lyrical, beautiful sequence of philosophical musings, sometimes autobiographical, always sensitive and wise, that are interrupted with after-shock regularity by shaken poems. The poems are exquisite. The book is a rare and special treasure. I hugged it to my heart.

The Broken Book by Fiona Farrell
Auckland University Press RRP $35
9781869405762

Reviewed by Carole Beu, The Women’s Bookshop, Auckland