nz herald book reviews

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Lawn of Buffalos

November 1, 2024 Leave a Comment

A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw (Text Publishing, 2024), 320pp, $38

At first blush, Tina Shaw’s A House Built on Sand , winner of the 2023 Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel, could be perceived as a novel whose theme is memory. What we remember is explored in its narrative as a facility that can be lost to us through disease and ageing, but also through deliberate manipulation. There are memories genuine and created, memories muddled and clear.

The greater theme of the book, though, is motherhood. Three generations of mothers feature: Maxine, Maxine’s mother, and Rose, Maxine’s daughter. Mothers, it could be said, are often the memory keepers in a family. They dispute recollections of events that don’t align with their own and perhaps keep records more avidly than fathers and grandfathers do. These two themes interweave and play out through the compelling story A House Built on Sand tells. [Read more…]

University Mug Shots

Dark Sky by Marie Connolly (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), 229pp, $37.99

Apart from outliers such as Dame Ngaio Marsh, who published her 32 whodunnits featuring police detective Roderick Alleyn in the middle years of the twentieth century, New Zealand crime fiction, up until fairly recently, was largely a sober, dour and intermittent concern, notable for occasional classics such as David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) and Maurice Gee’s In My Father’s Den (1972) . Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and now—thanks partly to the Ngaio Marsh Awards, established in 2010—Aotearoa New Zealand has a thriving crime-genre scene. It seems that celebrating a genre helps it grow as well. That growth is evident in the actual award entries: the 2010 offering had three finalists, while in 2023 there were seven finalists for Best Crime Fiction, and the 2024 Award announced a longlist of 12 novels. Notable New Zealand authors who have won Best Crime Novel include Fiona Kidman in 2019 with This Mortal Boy and Becky Manawatu with Auē in 2020. Even the late Renee was a convert to the genre with her 2019 crime novel The Wild Card . [Read more…]

Addicted to Playing in Post-Hardcore Punk Bands

Performance by David Coventry (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2014), 464pp, $38

An academic, recently arrived in Ōtepoti from the UK, once confided in me that he had published several science fiction novels under a pseudonym. If we were to pop next door to the University Book Shop, he assured me there would be a couple of his books in stock. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell me what his pen name was for fear of his ex-wife taking a share of the royalties. I was pretty sure the claim was bulldust, but could only muster the energy for 15 minutes of fruitless online sleuthing later that evening. I was left, and am still left, having to grudgingly entertain the possibility that he may have been telling the truth, and to salute this gambit if he was fibbing. [Read more…]

A Locked Door in an Abandoned House

Sewing Moonlight by Kyle Mewburn (Bateman Books, 2024), 328pp, $39.99

Sewing Moonlight is Kyle Mewburn’s first novel for adults. I was looking forward to reading this pukapuka because Mewburn’s writing for children is very highly regarded, and when I saw her at the Word/Kupu writers’ festival in Ōtautahi a couple of years ago her performance was one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever seen. I was also intrigued by the cover: the design gives dark fantasy vibes, and the title hints at stitch witchery. [Read more…]

Grief Momentarily Suspended

Meantime  by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, 2024), 82pp, $30;  Tidelines  by Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, 2024), 40pp, $25;  Chew the Bright Hysteria  by Rhondda Greig (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), 76pp, $35

  Meantime is the third collection of poetry from Majella Cullinane. Given its grief-laden subject matter and tone, describing it as a triumph feels slightly dissonant—and yet a triumph it is. It will make readers acutely aware of the passage of mortal time, but it should not be hurried through. This is a work that deserves to be read slowly and reflectively. [Read more…]

Delighted Belief

First Things by Harry Ricketts (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 240pp, $35

This first instalment of Harry Ricketts’ memoir includes, as the title suggests, memories of many ‘firsts’—a neat frame for gathering the detail from his first 29 years. He is an acute observer in writing about self and place—or, rather, the experience of self and place.

Ricketts begins with the first memory of his father, and from this moment we are aware that this is not merely a book of firsts but also of how they were experienced by the writer, or rather how he recalls them. The opening paragraph sets up uncertainty when, after describing the memory of his father painting a door, he adds: ‘At least, I always think of that as my first memory.’ More early moments are recalled, and then: ‘I can’t make much out of these snapshots.’ He often notes his flawed memory—‘Until I looked it up in my diary, I could have sworn …’—and his memory of feeling as opposed to precise detail of an event, such as Winston Churchill’s funeral: ‘I remember sitting in our tutor’s flat, staring at the box and feeling suitably sombre and moved.’ [Read more…]

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