This week at our Talking Books session we disucssed the 2026 International Booker winner Taiwan Travelogue. The conversation was wide-ranging: we talked about the content, themes of colonisation and power imbalances, the love story, language and translation, and the novel’s structure. Initially published in Taiwan in 2020, disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text of a Japanese writer from the late 1930s, its premise rests on the experiences of a writer touring Taiwan in 1938 and the relationship they develop with their translator. Aoyama Chizuko is a young woman, famous for her semi-autobiographical novel, a work that has captured Japan in print and in film. She’s in a position of privilege, able to live an independent bohemian life. She’s free to choose her own path. She heads to Taiwan to write about the place, the people and, in particular, the food. She loves to eat and has a furious appetite. Her initial assigned government interpretator is not to her liking, and, not very long after she arrives, her host introduces her to Ông Tsian-hóh (Ō Chizuru). This young woman will be pivotal not only in Aoyama’s experiences of food and culture in Taiwan, but also her emotional development, although one can not be sure just when Aoyama to recognises her lack of awareness. Aoyama is as demanding as Chizuru is accommodating. Through their travels on the island, the foods consumed (many) and their conversation, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ reveals much about Taiwan’s history, the Japanese empire's desire to colonise Taiwan as a gateway to the south (they arrived in 1895 and left in 1945 when Taiwan was handed to the Republic of China), and the many layers of power within society at the time. While Aoyama becomes increasingly enamoured with Chizuru, attempting to convince her to forgo an arranged marriage and move with her to Japan, she is blind to the reasons the young interpreter refuses this offer. Playing detective, Aoyama bullishly keeps questioning the young woman trying to unpick the story. How does Chizuru know so much about all the different foods ? How come she speaks multiple languages? Why does she insist on walking miles when she could just stay at Aoyama’s lodgings? What she doesn’t think to ask is: What does Chizuru want. Aoyama forgets that whatever she asks for will be attended to — Chizuru is her employee. Here is a situation of taking and giving, one where Aoyama is blind to the fact that her position, in spite of her obvious care for and love for this woman, makes the situation impossible. In this way, these characters carry the perspective of opposing forces within their psyche, much like the roles enforced by colonisation. Read Taiwan Travelogue for the history, the food, and to gain a little insight into how the past informs the present in this interesting country. Read it for its enjoyable structural play. There are footnotes from translators, there are notes at the back ‘fictionally’ responding to the ‘fictional’ publication of the rediscovered classic. The English edition is excellently translated by Lin King.
Still on racing and literature this week. I’ve been reviewing books for just over a decade on RNZ, and this week I had a thematic twist with my book selection: it was horseracing, which I find hilarious for a number of reasons. One: I’m in awe of horses, i.e a little terrified of their majesty (so, not a pony-club child, even if I did have a short fixation of wanting a pony and thinking there was plenty of room on the front lawn). Two: I have little interest in horse races and even less time for gamblers. This view was formed as a bored child waiting in the car outside the TAB, not quashed by the minute or so excitement of going to Trentham once — after the first race, there seemed to be a long hot day of waiting in the ‘family picnic area’ — a parched field of cars, mothers with headaches, and restless children. But I digress, as Gerald Murnane would say in his excellent memoir Something for the Pain. His love of horseracing started as a child, with the pictures of the horses in the newspaper and the racecallers’ voices through the radio. The names of the horses, the colours of the stable, the overheard stories of the adults around him: all a source of fascination. Strangely, he was not put off by his father’s wins and losses at the track; the debts often life-changing for the family. Murnane writes with such verve that I couldn’t help but be pulled in. In each chapter he tells a tale, one that reveals as much about the history of the racetrack in Australia from the 1940s through to the 70s and the people in his orbit, as it does with his idiosyncratic obsession (more on that later), and his life as a writer. (If you haven’t read any Murnane: think Beckett or Proust living in smalltown Australia.) His is the kind of writing where you stop mid-paragraph to wonder at the ease with which the language develops on the page. The sentences are near-perfect, the elliptical nature of the prose delightful rather than frustrating. And back to his idiosyncrasy. He has a real and imagined world of horses, names and colours. The colours of the stable being a central component of his love of the racetrack. When he describes two favourites in a race being (brown and white) (brown and cream) — always bracketed after the horse’s or jockey’s name — I imagine the field of horses racing around the track and the punters with their binoculars attempting to tell them apart. His imaginary world (not in this book; you’ll have to seek out a documentary about Murnane to find out more about this) consists of coloured marbles, names, and many files. It’s his schema. Which he does talk about in the memoir. A lifelong ambition to find the perfect betting style. Murnane’s gambling is one of patterns and restraint, of rules and analysis. It’s keeping your eyes open and ears to the ground, a studied form-book and people-watching. In Something for the Pain there is the comedic and the tragic; you could read it for the horseracing; for the insights into people’s behaviour, both good and bad; for the enjoyment of Murnane’s language; or to understand this excellent writer’s approach to literature.
I never intended to be so topical. The news of racetrack closures across Aotearoa has been popping up across the channels this week. Reading about horses and the lives of those that work the track wouldn’t have regstered on my radar a few years ago, but after reading the compelling Kick the Latch by American author Kathryn Scanlan and watching Australian author Gerald Murnane talk about his obsession with horse racing, both real and imagined, and how it shaped his writing, had me reaching for the ARC (Advance Reading Copy) that had landed on my desk. Marty Smith’s work of memoir and portraiture It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a Racecourse is centred on her local, Hawke’s Bay Racecourse, and follows the lives of the trainers, jockeys and trackworkers across a decade. Like Scanlan’s novel, she gets inside, behind the scenes. While Scanlan did this by developing a relationship with Sonia, a retired trainer, Marty is more like one of the crew. She’s trusted: she’s been a rider, owner/breeder; her family working with horses for generations. What started as a year-or-so project for this full-time teacher and poet morphed into a decade immersed in this world of thoroughbred racing, and the people who inhabit it. It’s a portrait of a community, one with its own rules, attitudes and language. A world where the horses are descibed as good and naughty, of 5am starts, of watching form and testing track conditions, of daring and risks — accidents happen. It has its stars, and its hacks, wins and losses.
In 2014 Marty Smith won The NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Prize for Horse with Hat, poems about her family, about horses and their human counterparts. Nina Mingya Powles described the collection as ‘gutsy’, the poems giving ‘ the impression of standing on the side of the road when a car swooshes past and you feel it shake the air in front of your face, tipping you a step backwards’. And Emma Neale wrote, 'This is alternately comic, wry, downbeat, vernacular, lyrical: yet is is also at times dark, plangent and moving in its use of narratives distilled from extended family relationships.' Smith brings these same sensibilities to her latest work. She gets alongside, witnesses and records faithfully, bringing to light the often unseen world of the trainer and the trackworkers. It Gets in your Blood has grit, drama alongside the daily grind, humour and pathos. There’s the vernacular of the workers, wry and sometimes oblique, often colourful; and the language of the track. For horse lovers some of this won’t be a foreign world, although it is a more particular subset of the riding world. For those who head to race days the terms of the Plough, Tie-Ups, Birdcage, Bullring, and so on, will be familiar. For the rest of us, we are outsiders, but through Marty Smith’s book we can come inside for a moment, she gives us a window to this world, blinkers off. In this it reminds me of Sven Lindqvist’s Bench Press (a dive into the world of bodybuilding). Like Scanlan’s book of episodic moments, Smith employs a shortpiece motif in the form of diary entries, ideal for this many-yeared project and for an industry that has a season, which kicks off in Spring. (Note: the Hawke’s Bay Racecourse is reopening very soon after unsafe track conditions closed it in September 2024 and, if you are in Hawke’s Bay, the book will be launched at the racecourse on Saturday 8 August). Like Kick the Latch, these pieces sometimes have witty titles, focus on a particular activity or happening, or a revealing conversation. There’s a handy map of the racecourse, as well as a table to explain the track form for the uninitiated, and a much needed list to the large cast, all those she spoke with and wrote about, and their roles on the horses and off. Occassionally, there’s also Marty herself, describing her own relationship with horses, her father and the love and respect she has for the industry. In her acknowldgements she reveals the working title for her project: Because I Love Them, claiming this was the answer, in one form ot another, to her question: Why do you do it? I think this is also the reason for Marty Smith’s immersion, and the result is Aotearoa’s own piece of racing literature, exploring a microcosm all its own.
A few years ago, I did a piece of concentrated post-grad study through the art school at Otago Polytechnic. An idea had been pestering me for several years, and I needed a focus to make it over the hump from rattling about in my mind to becoming something actual in the world. I’m usually project-driven when it comes to my art practice, but sometimes an outside structure (deadlines, unexpected conversations, an introduction to whole new bunch of thinkers and artists) is just what you need. Anyway, the study — a great mix of practical experimentation and theory, reading and writing — was perfect for this idea and I finally got it out of my system (mostly). The exciting thing, apart from the study itself (yes, I would do more if time and money weren’t barriers), was what followed: an exhibition and an accompanying book. I never intended to write a book, let alone a book of short stories. That was 2023. The book sold out (admittedly a small printrun) and we reprinted. Now there are just a handful left. So, if you are curious about these stories, interested in jewellery (or objects in general) and our relationship with it (bodily and psychologically), you might like one of the final copies. And it’s also nicely produced, has diagrams and an index, and, although I never intended it, it is surprisingly funny.
(PS: I think there is another book brewing…)
Aug 9 – Fog could be called ‘How A Notebook Became a Fiction''. It could be dismissed as a disjointed list, or recognsed for its realist nature, or, more aptly, embraced for its brilliant author’s machinations. Kathryn Scanlan, author of the excellent Kick the Latch, found a five-year diary at an estate auction. Falling apart, worn, and illegible in places, somehow it resonated with her. These notings of daily life; the weather, the visitors, the ordinary weariness of aging. There’s food and gatherings, the deaths and births, iilnesses and misadventures as well as the mundane beauty of life. Our diaries or notebooks are our own, whether that’s your physical journal or digital one. We have our own shorthand, the initials or pet names of our most initimate family and friends. Our own shorthand for tasks, thoughts or feelings. Some of us are visual recorders — a sketch or a doodle; while others will write long paragraphs intermittently. Some of us begin well and peter out before the year is done, leaving crisp pages for another purpose (maybe scoring board games). But back to Scanlan, who spent fifteen years reading, studying and dissecting the diary of this elderly woman. Taking it as inspiration, she has written her own version, a series of fractured, seemingly irrelevant, episodes or jottings. As you read on, allowing yourself to abandon trying to work it all out, patterns of time, people, emotions, weather etc emerge. Here, an ordinary life, captured in a work of both deconstruction, almost destruction, and creation. Through Scanlan and her interpretation or disruption, we find in our hands something remarkable and surprising.
Megan Hunter writes beautifully. I was beguiled by her first novel, The End We Start From, with its mesmerising poetic language and precise emotional observation of parenthood under pressure. It was cli-fi of a literary nature. When Harpy announced itself, the dials turned a notch or two higher on the pressures of motherhood. This was a darker encounter amid the chaos of betrayal. Language-wise, again, taut and precisely tuned. Days of Light has a luminosity all of its own. Open the book at any page, and the language takes you to the inner world of Ivy and the times she lives through. Opening in 1938, we meet Ivy, nineteen and ready to launch into her ‘adult life’. It’s Easter, war on the horizon. The family gathers. (Think Bloomsbury group. Unconventional.) The guest of honour, her much adored brother Joseph’s fiancée, Frances, is running late for lunch. Although the train is late, all seems right in the world, until the spell of this idyll is broken by a drowning incident. A singular moment that will change Ivy’s world. Swimming under the stars Joseph disappears. Ivy, his swimming companion, can’t save him. All she recalls is a bright shining light. This elusive light will appear in different guises over her lifetime. Days of Light recalls Ivy’s life in 6 precise days; Easter Sunday 1938, April 1938, April 1944, April 1956, April 1965, and Easter Sunday 1999. Frances will appear across these pages (she is like a touchstone for Ivy), and others who are core to her. Bear, the writer, who becomes her older husband. Her fraught relationship with her artist mother, and her more familial love for Anne, their housekeeper. But it is Joseph who propels her onward towards a luminous answer about what life is, almost always just out of reach. Ivy is always searching, looking for an answer beyond herself, in language, in art, and in faith. Ultimately, it is in the moments when she turns toward herself, that something unexpected is ignited. With reviews mentioning Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Graham Swift, Hunter has a lot to live up to. Days of Light is luminous in content, structure and language, and a telling portrayal of a woman’s life through changing times.
Hardback in stock, Paperback due September 2026
Where to start with this slim novel? It’s brilliant. The writing is crisp. Lerner not only writes well, but with economy. Each word feels as though it belongs on the page, each action or non-action vital. Transcription is about things that matter; not a cluster of meaningless or fabulous characters or plot twists that may entertain but don’t add up to much in the end, like much of what passes as a novel in the oversaturated publishing world — as well as other social media that tell ‘stories’. Ironically, a central theme in this novel is technology, and it’s definitely exploring ‘story’: what gets told, what’s said or supposedly said, what’s remembered compared to what’s recorded (or not). The novel opens with the unnamed narrator heading by train to Providence. It’s the return of the nervous protégé to his alma mater to record the ‘final interview’ with Thomas, a famous cultural critic, who is now in his 90s. The narrator is restless, travelling backwards (which makes him nauseous), photographing his masked self in the reflection of the moving train’s window. He looks at the photo and deletes it. He begins a conversation about the morning's problems by txt. This small passage tells the reader so much. It’s sometime after the lockdowns; recording yourself and then just as easily deleting yourself on your handheld device is a common phenomena; our awareness of ourselves in place and time determined by or acted out through the technology we hold close to us (continuously). This same technology enables us to escape the present by replaying or reimaging the past, or determining a future that will never be actual. Time is a central player in the conversations in the three distinct parts of this novel, and the way in which Lerner seamlessly takes us through conversation from America in the 2020s, then to late 1990s and back to Germany in the 1940s, not layering in historical facts or particular incidents but rather by reference to cultural touchpoints, mentions of music, philosophers and writers creating what made me think of a series of vibrations. Vibrations that resonated through not only time, but the shared (and often differently interpreted) experiences of each of the main characters. Are these vibrations a transcription of a sort?
Yet it is technology that lets the narrator down. He drops his phone in the sink. It’s kaput. And, as much as he tries to suggest that the interview could be the next day, and the evening for ‘catching up’, Thomas is keen to get started, and the narrator is too cowardly to say his phone isn’t working. So the interview goes ahead without a recorded transcript. The protégé doesn’t even take notes. Or so it seems. There is the possibility that Thomas suspects there is something amiss. There is the possibility that even if the phone had worked the subsequent published interview would have been a fabrication. Ben Lerner is leaning into this idea of the real and imagined, of what is fiction? And the novel is dotted with this concept. Of how we look, how we remember, and what happens when we start to think that something is imagined or described rather than ‘real’ – whatever that may be. When his phone doesn’t work, the narrator begins to ‘notice’ everything, “The stones are stonier”. He has no google directions. He would have used them if his phone was working even though he knows the way. Without his phone, time shifts as his head has space to imagine and remember, and he’s walking through the campus of his student days. If this sounds nostalgic or overwrought, don’t worry: it’s not. These moments are often depicted wryly, with a wink to the reader and a self-deprecating honesty.
The characters in Transcription are ordinary and real (and possibly often Lerner himself, or facets of). They are fallible and not always likable. There are no heroes, although maybe sometimes heroic, if you can call it that, attempts to deal with our contemporary world, that’s a world on the intimate as much as the wider scale. This is most telling in the passages where the narrator talks about his relationship with his daughter, and Max (his friend from college, who also happens to be Thomas’s actual son) discusses his own daughter’s problems. Both children have issues with the world, and these issues visit upon their bodies. One through anxiety and a refusal to participate (go to school) and the other through a refusal to eat. Both these problems are overcome to some degree via mindless games and social media dross. That this distraction, although empty, can be an antidote for other more harmful problems, puts our devices, and what they deliver to us, into that ambivalent space, providing a lifeline despite appearing meaningless. How do we measure this against the ability of the book to provide a place to escape to?
Transcription is completely satisfying — it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that ends so well. Ben Lerner covers so much ground in these 130 pages. Here we encounter interviewer, author, and cultural critic; here are the fathers, Thomas the elder, Max the son, and the unnamed narrator — the cultural son. There are the issues of the modern world (climate, politics, image), threaded through but never belaboured. There is memory and misremembering — what is invention? And where does fiction start?
We will be discussing Transcription at our next Talking Books session on July 14
Find out more and join in by Zoom
An appealing history of Japan in the nineteenth history, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a tale both personal and encompassing. Tsuneno is the daughter of a priest. Growing up in a small mountainous village, the temple is central to her life and expectations. Married at 12, life seems mapped out: she will be a diligent temple wife. Yet 15 years on and with no children in sight, she is sent home again with the divorce papers—not an uncommon occurrence in the nineteenth century, where women would be remarried—a failed relationship not necessitating disaster. Two more marriages down the road and the picture for Tsuneno isn’t quite as rosy, her family are losing patience with her and she has other ideas. Seeking independence, she goes against her family’s wishes and knowledge, pawns her belongings (mostly clothes), and makes her way to the city of Edo in the care of a family acquaintance—someone she thought she could trust. In a relatively short time, Tsuneno’s world is turned upside down. Not only has the trustworthy friend betrayed her, physically and emotionally, but he has also left her in financial peril and abandoned her in the city. Living in a tiny room, at the mercy of her landlord, without money or warm clothes, bedding or utensils, she is desperate to find work. Her dreams of a good position in a Shogun household are remote, but she does get a job working long hours as a housemaid. It isn’t ideal, but it enables her to stay in Edo, a lively city with prospects. Tsuneno rises and falls alongside the city. This is the story of a woman and the story of a city, Edo, at the end of a golden age, known as the Great Peace, a time just prior to the arrival of the American gunship and Commodore Perry. As we read we fall into step beside Tsuneno, seeing the informal structures of the city — the migrant workers and peddlers — that underpins the economic structure of the more formal organisations, the geisha and the theatre performers that brighten the evenings, the temple priests, the samurai of all classes (one of whom will impact this woman’s life more than she expected) and the hierarchies of the ruling shogunate classes. Pieced together from letters (between Tsueno and her family), family records kept at the temples, combined with historical events (famine, fire, political machinations) and research, Amy Stanley creates a gripping account of a woman who chose between family and freedom, who made the most of the hand she was dealt. Rich in detail with its vivid descriptions of the environs (urban and rural), and lively portraits of Tsuneno, her family and the people of Edo, Stranger in a Shogun’s City is a compelling history of an ordinary woman in a fascinating time and place.
Rachel Kushner’s essays in The Hard Crowd read both like edgy youthful memories giving us a window into a life lived on the edge of danger, as well as intelligent analyses of political structures and cultural output. From the daring of her motorcycle racing days and obsessions with classic cars (it’s not surprising the opening scene in The Flamethrowers kicks such adrenaline on the page), in the opening essay 'Girl on a Motorcycle' to her conversations about literary intrigues Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson to mention a few, to her knowledge of Italian 1970s politics and prison reform which play a major role respectively, in The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, to her connections and interest in the New York art scene, the collected essays are varied in style. Some are self-effacing and gritty, in line with the popular 'personal essay' trend, yet Kushner’s memories remain dark, honest and absorbing without the cloyingness of the self-reflective and sometimes self-satisfied elements of this form. In her essays about writers, she is endlessly fascinating, almost finding her way through the writing — through description, analysis and the anecdotal to an understanding or a reflective essence of the writer and their work — giving us, the reader, an insight that makes us wish to seek out not more about the said author, but their output — to delve for ourselves into their words. There’s also a great essay with accompanying images (film stills, photographs and other ephemera), 'Made to Burn', which considers the influences and research for her novel The Flamethrowers. It’s filled with quirky snippets of information, as many of the essays are, which cast small surprises like flitting shadows and light bulb moments — observations that rub up against each other creating a texture that marries guns and art, writers and alcohol, and the adrenaline of competitive danger with fierce loyalty. And in pure juxtaposition to this hard-arse style are essays that will stop you in your tracks: a heartbreaking visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is so established that it is functionally a dysfunctional town, and a conversation with an American prison abolitionist that raises some hard questions about incarceration. In The Hard Crowd, Kushner describes herself as the soft one, but these punchy essays make me think there are different kinds of softness, and Kushner's is one that has a core of steel, unafraid to look with intent.
If you can resist this book, you are an expert in avoiding something thrilling. Giselle Clarkson’s excellent book about all things birds is sure to engage young minds and old. Filled to the brim with intriguing information, it’s perfectly pitched with its bite-size chunks of text, excellent diagrams and illustrations, and humorous asides. Clarkson encourages us to be avian investigators: equipped with our toolkit of omnibird knowledge and our best tool — observation. Being a bird puzzle-solver has never been more lively. From poop to feathers, to all the parts of the wing, to the different styles of wings, and tails, and heads, and beaks, you’ll be spotting birds high above you, deciphering and coming up with —It’s a gull! A blackbird or possibly a thrush! A starling! There are 18 investigator notes featuring a range of birds, including ducks, gulls, corvids, chickens, flightless birds, birds of prey, and the humble sparrow. There are beautiful eggs (spot the odd one out!), a plumology lesson, an array of different nests from the carefully woven thrush work to the scattershot style of the sparrow, and an explainer on bird names — you’ll know your gymnorhina tibicen from your griseotyrannus aurantioatrocristatus in no time! And so much more. Clarkson’s wonderful illustrations draw you in (there’s great bird attitude here), and the text is lively — so many facts, but also humour and speculation. While there are answers to bird questions you didn’t know you had, there are also questions to ask. What does it feel like to fly? What are they saying? What bird would you be? There’s a charge to use your imagination and your detective skills (observational senses). It's a book about birds and it’s a book about noticing the natural world around us — its awesomeness. Omnibird is a gem — a book that informs, inspires and delights.
If you’re ready to discover new biscuit recipes and fill your tins, then Crumbs: Cookies and Sweets from Around the World will extend your knowledge and please your taste buds. Filling our tin right now are a batch of Maltese Christening Cookies/Biskuttini tar-Rahal. Both delicate and robust these aniseed and caraway seed mouthfuls are perfect with coffee in the evening and the light lemon icing makes them a refreshing choice for morning or afternoon tea. Organised geographically, this book is packed with 300 authentic recipes from 100 countries, from Azerbaijan to Laos to Wales. There are Scandanavian and Middle Eastern treats, Belgian biscuits and shortbread goodness. The introduction sets out what is a cookie, all the tools for making good biscuits, and tips and hints that will take your baking to the next cookie level. While there are American cup measurements, there are also metric weights and following these makes for the best biscuit dough (useful when using our slightly heavier flour). The food photography is reassuring. This is home cooking. The recipes are easy to follow, and while there are some recipes that might require a special ingredient, most are pantry staples. I’m ready to explore Stuffed Maghrebu Loaf Cookies from Tunisia and the ‘Snow White’ Crescent Cookies from Indonesia, as well as perfect sesame rings from the Levant which are packed with fennel or anise seeds. So whether you enjoy cinnamon spiced biscuits, crisp biscotti or chocolate-dipped morsels, there’s a world of choices and plenty of tins to fill or gifts to share. Crumbs unites the world with its similarities across borders and highlights the specific ingredients and particular methods that give each biscuit a home.
Frank doesn’t like the dark. He’s not so keen on annoying little brothers and not great at sports. He likes books and he likes Alice, his next door neighbour. Apart from Alice and her sweet dog Woof, Frank doesn’t have any friends. He’s shy. So there aren’t many guests at his birthday party, but something unexpected happens when Frank offers the small dog some cake. Woof nips Frank’s finger. The cake is devoured, despite the single drop of blood spreading through the icing. Later…Frank has a dream that he’s runing through the forest on all fours! Waking up he sees muddy footprints all over his bedroom floor. Strange! And things get stranger. Frank’s the monster. A very sweet shaggy white furry monster. One that expands in the mind of the townsfolk to a sharp-toothed, massive-clawed howling terror. Things come to a head one day when Frank heads for the beach sniffing out some delcious food and you guessed it, he’s in his monster form. A part of Frank knows he’s heading towards danger. The townsfolk are ready to capture the ‘terrible monster’, but Frank makes an escape with the help of some unexpected new friends. Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn. There are new friends to be made, and a watchful owl to meet. A golden key and a library of surprises are sure to play a bigger part in the next two books in this charming series. Mats Strandberg is a writer of horror and mystery for adults and children, and the story moves along with pace when action demands it and as well as quiet interludes for Frank’s reflective thoughts on his situation. There are familar settings as well as the unexpected underworld, humour to keep a young reader hooked and just the right amount of ‘scary’. For anyone feeling awkward, they are sure to feel right at home. The illustrations by Sofia Falkenhem are both whimsical and detailed, and she captures the characters perfectly. Her depicition of Frank as nine year old boy reveals his awkwardness and hesitation, while Frank the shifter in his animal form is all bounding cuteness (i.e. not scary at all). Translated from the Swedish by Julia Marshall. This is a delightful ‘read to’ for 5 to 7, or ‘read alone’ up to 9. And with two more books in the series out this year, Frank the Monster is sure to become a new favourite.
A few years ago, I accidently came across a podcast called Ear Hustle when I was searching for something else. Ear Hustle is a non-fiction podcast about prison life centred around San Quentin State Prison. It’s a fascinating and honest insight into the lives of the prisoners: often sad, sometimes brutual, yet also laced with humour and pathos. It’s eye-opening, as is Asher Emanuel’s brilliant The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City, which shares some of the same attributes. Here, the action focuses on the criminal justice system. The courts, the Hutt Valley in particular (although this could be any district court in Aotearoa), and the systems that intertwine with these courts: social welfare, the police, bailiffs, probation officers, housing services, and rehab, to name a few. I say action, because Emanuel’s reportage style burns with immediacy; with its intimate portrayals and authentic dialogue. The book is predominantly verbatim conversation, and centres around two defendants, Nathan Morley and Rikihana Wallace, and their overworked defence lawyer Lewis Skerett. I dare you to read the first few chapters and not be hooked. The lives are real, the crimes are ordinary, but this is a world many live outside of, and often our knowledge of the justice system is only of sound-bite news items which reveal very little of substance or tend towards the sensational. The Valley avoids this dramatic nonsense, giving instead a direct and sometimes confronting view of what the criminal justice system looks like from the inside, and more importantly from the perspective of those that navigate it, whether they are the defendents, the lawyers or the special courts that attempt to mitigate the glaring problems at the heart of the justice system and the wider welfare system. Asher Emanuel draws us into this world with clarity, calmness and care. The Valley has integrity, and is vitally important. The wider issues of poverty, government policy over several decades, our degraded welfare system, issues with our addiction services, as well as housing supply, all pulse simulatneously alongside the stories of Nathan and Rikihana. If you read one book this year make it this one. (We will be discussing The Valley at our June Talking Books session).
When life is a bit tough, we all need a good book. When you’re unsure and feel like a square peg in a round hole, you need a good book even more. Ever been eleven and lonely? Or wondered why your best friend is hanging out with the mean kids? Or wished your mother didn’t sigh so much? If you answer yes to any of these questions then you need Cricket Karlsson. Ever wanted to make art? Ride a horse in the moonlight? Ever been unable to get out of bed or unable to get someone you love out of bed? Then you need Cricket Karlsson. Cricket Karlsson is eleven, has a ‘potato’ heart (which is currently mashed because her best friend Noa isn’t talking to her), is finding out about love, is visiting her aunt in the psych ward, loves to draw and doesn’t like the horse girls. And she has secrets — secrets that only a best friend, like Noa, knows! The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson from the pen of Kristina Sigunsdottir and the brush of Ester Eriksson is another standout from Gecko Press. I loved it, and it’s even better on the second reading. It has lists of not very Ugliest Words, absurd and unlikely Things Grandpa Says you Can Die From, unusual Psychiatric Illnesses I Don’t Want, and delightful Secrets I Have Only Told to Noa. Told with the keen observation of an eleven-year-old with all the concerns of childhood and changing circumstances, the words leap off the page with feistiness, humour and pathos. It lightly touches on worries and fears (climate change, mental health, sadness, regret) while embracing the best things about being that age when you’ll still a kid, but only just. Who hasn’t noticed the horse girls with their neighing and prancing, or squirmed when a boy (or a girl) is doe-eyed and you just don’t like him like that, or locked themselves in the bathroom (sometimes crying) to avoid being harassed? Cricket Karlsson finds out that life isn’t always what you expect, that loneliness passes, and that even an eleven-year-old can make a sad person happy. Black humour abounds and Cricket Karlsson is a star (with secrets and lists, a big heart and a little mischief, and her favourite food is cheese-on-cheese-in-cheese).
Do you know about our Children’s Book Subscriptions? We offer a personally curated book subscription service for all ages from age zero. Some of our subscribers have grown with us and are now well into their teens. Every month or second month we select and send a book to a child or teen. Each book is selected according to their age, reading level, and interests. We always like to choose for the individual rather than rattling out the next same bestseller to everybody. If you are interested in purchasing a book subscription for a child you know, get in touch or have a look at our packages here. We can accommodate your needs, and work to your budget, so just let us know via email if you have a special request.
Here are three new picture books that help children address change, their worries, or fears. These are books that wil resonate with young children and help them feel brave, reassured, and capable. Each can open a door to a conversation about difficult situations or the emotions we have when things are different.
In Rebecca Stead’s Anything a young child moves to a new aprtment with her father. Things are just not right! They are not the same as ‘home’. This is subtle and charming book about a new place. The cake isn’t right, the rooms smell of paint, the closet is too small to hide in, the bathtub isn’t big and blue. Daddy lets the child have three wishes; they can wish for anything! A rainbow on the bedroom wall, pizza for dinner, but a wish for home needs a good resolution, and Daddy comes up with the best journey. The illustrator Gracey Zhang’s signature style of ballpoint-pen drawing and gouache create detail and fluidity. Some pages are spare, while others have wonderful bursts of colour reflecting the ups and downs of the child’s emotions. The predominantly line-drawing style captures the uncertainity of the new apartment and the surrounding neighbourhood, while the colourful bursts reflect the chld’s imagination — her ‘anythings’ and as we move to the last few pages, the adjustment to Aprtment 3B. The colours settle into the landscape, juts as the child settles and breakfast is served. Her new favourite kind.
Another book about home — not about moving but about what is missing. A cat. In My Friend May , written and illustrated by Julie Flett, we meet a child whose everyday companion has disappeared. Margaux and May have been the best of friends and have grown up together. She is understandably distraught that her pet is missing and, no matter where they look, how many times they call, May is nowhere to be found. And not only that, but her favourite auntie Nitôsis is moving to the city. Margaux helps her pack the last of her belongings into boxes. The next day, no May, and Margaux is worried. What if she is hurt, alone or hungry? In a city far away Nitôsis, is tired and hungry after her long journey. As she settles down, unpacked boxes around her, to have some soup, she hears a faint meow. This quiet, gentle story about familial relationships hits all the rights notes. Flett is a Cree-Métis author, and the book has a bonus glossary of Cree words and cultural information about friendships.
For children who have experienced trauma, frightening situations, or violence, whether directly or as a bystander, being able to find ways to express this fear and feel safe are important. In a world where violence is a daily occurance, it’s vital we have books that do not shy away from the hard issues. I Will Not Be Scared is beautifully and clearly written by Jean-François Sénéchal and sweetly illustrated by Simone Rea. It is a picture books about freedom, war, fear, and courage. A young bunny can’t get to sleep. Something has happened at school to make him feel scared, and unsure of his safety in this new home. Mama gently waits until he is ready to talk about it. With much reassurance, and encourgement, Bunny feels able to express himself, and unpick some of the deeper emotions that underpin his fear. And in freeing himself of these feelings, be able to find the conviction to be brave. A tender story which will not only reassuire, but gives us hope for a better world.
Walls, straight roads, borders, maps, places in the landscape, a meeting place, construction on taken land, roads dismissed, control, histories overwritten, obliterated, questions of the past for the present and the future, justice, the disappeared, the unnavigable, violence, justification, denial, displacement, erasure. In Minor Detail Adania Shibli takes us to the desert. It’s 1949 and the military have set up camp near the Egyptian border, to stake their ground, and to wipe the remaining Arabs from the new state of Israel. Told from the perspective of the officer in command of a platoon, the observation is crystal clear in his description of the landscape — the Negev both brutal and awesome, his encounter with a scorpion — the wound on his swelling leg repulsive, as are his actions towards the young Bedouin girl the soldiers have abducted and raped, and he has killed. The horror of this crime is never glazed over, and the actions of the officer are never questioned by those around him. In fact, his fellows fight to get in the queue. The horror of this event is voiced by an increasingly agitated dog. The motif of the barking or howling dog continues into the second part of this novella. A young Palestinian woman in Ramallah on discovering this event when the archives are opened is compelled to travel to the place of reckoning. Compelled by compassion, and a minor detail: her birthday is the Bedouin girl's day of death. To travel to the zone she must borrow a fellow worker’s ID, and rent the car in another’s name. As she travels with two maps overlayed, one historic showing the villages and roads that have now been almost completely obliterated, and the other the zones of the Israeli state, she drives to museums, settlement villages and towards the military-controlled zones, the new roads burn their straight lines and codes of engagement into the landscape, as well as her psyche. She is haunted by the girl, and there is always a dog pacing or howling nearby. You question her sanity in carrying out such a mission, and then question your own judgement. Should confronting an injustice be abandoned because it is dangerous? As she passes through each checkpoint, each glance at the borrowed ID, it feels as if a knife is being drawn slowly over a whetting stone, its edge sharper each time. And you realise that living under an authoritarian regime where you are a person without freedom of movement, where you are marked as unwanted, means that your last breath could be at any moment — a gun always trained on you. Shibli’s writing is sparse and evocative, the tension tautly held — there is no let up. Minor Detail is a powerful display of resistance.
I read Swimming Studies when it was released in hardback back in 2017. It’s one of those books that stays with you. I enjoy Shapton’s writing and her quirky book projects, and my first discovery was her relationship breakup novel told as an auction. Swimming Studies is a series of essays on swimming, through word and art. Whether it’s the act of swimming, Shapton’s history of competitive swimming, her daily dips, the other swimmers, or descriptions of water, the science of water, the ocean, the pool, each encounter with the act and the world of swimming is intimate and perceptive. There’s the delight of swimming in the essays, alongside immersive layers exploring memory, adolescence, drawing, obsession and solitude. Aside form Shapton’s particular eye, one of the things that lifts this book above others in the ‘swimming book’ genre is the inclusion of artworks — Shapton’s own. There are abstract watercolours of swimming places, the movements of the bodies in the water, and portraits of swimmers. And being Shapton, there are objects (she was one of the authors of Women in Clothes — out of print at the moment but a new edition looking likely in 2027) — her swimsuit collection. And of course, the stories that come with them. Luckily, Swimming Studies is available again as a lovely Daunt Books paperback with french flaps, complete with all the artworks and a new foreword by author Rita Bullwinkel.
A Skinful of Shadows is an immensely compelling novel for children and adults alike. Frances Hardinge creates wonderful characters, intriguing plots, and ideas that will stay with you long after you shut the covers. A Skinful of Shadows is set in England in the 1640s, the English Civil War is brewing, Puritans and Catholics are at loggerheads, and so are the King and parliament. In a small village called Popular, Makepeace lives with her mother. Making a piecemeal living from lace-making and odd jobs, they live in a small barren room in the home of her aunt and uncle, barely accepted by them or the village. When her mother dies, Makepeace is sent to the home of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, where she becomes a kitchen skivvy. Makepeace, an illegitimate child, has the Fellmotte gene, one that enables them to possess ghosts. The Fellmottes have dangerous and dark plans for her — ones that will consume her in their obsession to preserve the family line, the Fellmotte power and property. Not everyone is an enemy, though, and she makes plans with her half-brother James to escape Grizehayes. After many failed attempts, the chaos of the Civil War gives them the perfect opportunity to escape. When James lets her down, Makepeace finds herself in an even more precarious situation, but with the help of a bear and her overwhelming desire to survive she begins a journey across England to find a document worth more than gold, a document that will grant her freedom from the Fellmotte family and ensure their fall from grace. Like all good mysteries, there are plenty of turns and forks on the road, and those that help and those that hinder. Yet the more intriguing elements are those that involve the ghosts or the souls that are possessed, some of which are malevolent, others helpful. Makepeace is an excellent heroine and her relationship with Bear is endearing. A story about power, possession and purpose.
From the rusting hulks of the industrial era, from China to America, from the bodily functions of blood to the philosophical musings on the allegories of nature and man, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Rust in the 'Object Lessons' series is a fascinating exploration of this chemical process. Fittingly introducing us to his subject through the most obvious - and what comes to mind immediately (for me at least) when we consider rust - Rabaté describes industrial wastelands and the slow decay of iron as it oxidises creating layers of rust. In a country where corrugated iron and steel infrastructure is synonymous with growth and decline, construction and patched sheds, placing ourselves in the world of the American Dust Bowl or the industrial decline of China or the agricultural wastelands of Australia is more a matter of scale than of foreign territory. In these discussions of rust, Rabaté draws on cultural references in literature and film: Paul Hertneky’s memoir Rust Belt Boy, Wang Bing’s documentary Rust, and an Australian novel by Paddy O'Reilly, The Fine Colour of Rust. Where the reader starts with the idea of decay and decline, Rabaté's analysis moves us to see rust also as a saviour, a surprising and not always negative keeper of time. Using the same method, the conversation moves towards the metaphoric, and here again texts illustrate the author’s thinking. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K is explored as a metaphor for renewal and the land giving, through its richness in iron, a plentiful supply of vegetables — the one the main character is most enamoured of being the red-orange (rust-coloured) pumpkin. As we are drawn into this examination of the notion of rust, oxidation, iron — the ideas of nature in flux — the text moves into deeper discussions of the works of several philosophers: Hegel and Ruskin each have chapters devoted to them, lovingly entitled 'Hegel and the Restlessness of Rust' and 'Ruskin: Nothing Blushes like Rust'. These are thoughtful, lively and witty explorations worth re-reading. Alongside these more academic musings are anecdotal tales from the author’s childhood - his pet turtle features with her rust coloured shell, as does his anaemia and the prescribed medicine of fresh horse’s blood. Another writer explored in response to the ideas of rust and decay is Kafka, and his story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which features rusty scissors and is also an allegory for his views on the politics and machinations of Zionism and its effect upon the Arab communities of Palestine. In the final parts of the book Rabaté extends the conversation of rust to imperfection, to the flaw that makes an object exquisite — the mark of time, nature and artist — in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in the sculptural works of monuments purposely made to alter over time through oxidisation, and in architecture that allows the metal to record time on its facades. The concluding chapter introduces the hopefulness of rust - the discovery of ‘green rust’, an ecological tool that can clean iron-heavy waters and that may lead to technology that will break down waste. Rust is ‘infinitely restless’ in all its guises — physically, emotionally and intellectually — and Rabaté’s musings are infinitely provocative with their eclectic amalgams. Another excellent addition to the 'Object Lessons' series.
I’ve been reading Ali Smith for decades. From her debut novel, Like, through her short story collections, Hotel World springs to mind, her retelling of mythologies, Girl Meets Boy and The Story of Antigone, to the discomfort of There But For The and the unexpected visitor in The Accidential, to the art of How to Be Both, Smith’s books have always been intriguing, centred on human interactions and our ability to live in the world. Yet it was the seasonal quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer; and the books that have followed: Companion Piece, Gliff, and now Glyph; with their immediacy and provocation to act, to be part of the story that pushed her writing and the reading of her work into a realm where only Ali Smith could take us. Her ability to use language, to incorporate art, culture, and politics is invigorating, pointed and surprising.
Here are some of the things I said in my reviews at the close of reading each of the quartet novels and Gliff: “….a book that will both stun you and fill you with hope, moments of kindness, forgiveness, and a window to a better world if we dare to step through.”, “..a meditation on time, ….and the surprising things that the past can reveal to us in the present.”; “…with a hammering of words that are explosive…demands your attention. Ferocious and tender.”, “…draws richness out of desolation…and she does it with intelligence, wit and style.”, “To stay in this playfulness of words, the richness of language and story, to be suspended with curiosity, while also confronted by the urgency of our 21st century landscape must surely be a work of genius.”
In Ali Smith’s novels I have been introduced to artists, and experienced writers and mythology in new ways. I am asked to see, to shift or sharpen my perspective bringing the telescope’s lens to its best advantage, even when that clarity is frightening. Characters are brave, and also cowards. The curtains of the theatre that allow a player to be revealed, and then escape and hide, are constantly in motion. We flex our emotions. The reader is emboldened, then stunned. We remember why we should ask the most important question: Why? Ali Smith feeds our desire for story, for narrative, not at its surface level, but at its core: why narrative is important; whether that is in words, art, myth, nature, politics; and how it is used and how we can claim it. We can read the world, see it for what it is and more importantly what it could be. I think reading books is a subversive act: in reading we acquire knowing. We are in the book, and this action does not allow interference. If a book makes you curious, curious enough to ask questions, you are thinking. If you are thinking, this is a good thing. I have two new Ali Smiths on my reading pile, Glyph and So in the Spruce Forest. Autmnn will be a good reading season.