Sophie, Standing There

Sophie, Standing There, by Meg Mason

It’s a dull title, but apt. Sophie stands there a lot, waiting around for people to need her. I thought Meg Mason’s previous novel, Sorrow and Bliss was a terrifically clever (and dare I say funny in the context of mental illness?) description of an awkward, dysfunctional woman. I loved it. I felt such sympathy for the character. But my God. Sophie. What a loser. There’s nothing at all funny in this story, not funny haha, not funny peculiar, not funny clever, which is a shame as Meg Mason is absolutely capable of all three. But if you’re feeling down and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude to cheer you up, Sophie’s your girl.

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Whistler – book reveiw

Whistler, by Ann Patchett

I was over a third of the way through this book and asking myself, what’s with the horse on the cover? My God, Ann Patchett is an incredibly clever writer. I’m a huge fan: The Dutch House, Tom Lake, State of Wonder are all big favourites of mine. Whistler is the best of all of them. Don’t worry about the horse. The horse will come back.

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George is on the way

George, a novel by Cristina Sanders

It’s no secret that George Grey is the subject of my next historical novel and I’m not at all embarrassed to say that I have dipped into the speculative realm to give him a bit of swag.

Bateman Books have taken George on, and I’ve sent the final (final final final) proofs off today. Hooray! I let George have an early read. He liked it.  The rest of you will have to wait until February.

A Waiter in Paris – book review

A Waiter in Paris, by Edward Chisholm

Paris is a city of illusion, according to Chisholm in his brilliant memoir, A Waiter in Paris. He dives into its dark side. Nonetheless, he does the city no harm at all. The long hours, grim streets and all-night bars throw a bohemian romance over all the misery as if the behind-the-scenes exploitation and squalor he describes are a necessary background patina to the bright lights above. Think Moulin Rouge and the painted girls dying of consumption. What’s a star without night?

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Land – book review

Land, by Maggie O’Farrell

Firstly, what an incredibly beautiful cover! The colours of rich earth and moody sky and deep wells in the Irish landscape that a reader might fall into and never find their way back as happened to several characters in this book, though we’ll never really know why. This is a novel dripping with the mist of superstitions, damp with hidden meanings, fractured with the bones of ancestors lying under the soil. A worthy successor to Hamnet, then, and absolutely ripe for those happy to believe in the hocus pocus of sacred springs and gollum-like fish. Judging by book sales, that’s a great many of us. ‘Give me the ring, it says’ (the fish).

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Night, Ma – book review

Night, Ma, by Elizabeth Knox

I had bought Night, Ma and left it on my table for a while, wondering if I really wanted to go there when there were nice, frivolous, bouncy books still on the pile to read. I finally opened it with trepidation, still bewildered as to why writers turn themselves inside out to offer up all their innermost vulnerabilities. I’m a late-comer to the intimacy of memoir. Now of course I recognise it is this very vulnerability that makes the genre so compelling. Human nature recognises and engages with truth, and truth is at the heart of every great story. Perhaps we connect with memoir in a more primal way than fiction and feel every scene, every touch, with far more intensity because it’s not just made up out of some frivolous author’s head, or some AI bot. Here’s the truth, as one woman sees it. Night, Ma comes alive through Elizabeth Knox’s almost subcutaneous observations of the people closest to her. And that’s fascinating.

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London Falling —book review

London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Hard not to have The Clash in your head when reading this. Their iconic London Calling song was written some 30 years earlier, but I feel the same sense of urgency and high stakes: London is drowning / And I, I live by the river.

Radden Keefe’s London Falling from the outside looks like a cleverly constructed and wildly imaginative crime novel but in fact, is a meticulously researched and impeccable referenced true story of the Russian-financed underworld in London and a boy who gets sucked in.

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The Heart in Winter – book review

The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry

This is an intense Irish love story. An absolute, classic gem of a love story. Our lovers, Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, are hapless, feckless and doomed right from the start, but their love never falters. I say it’s Irish because the writer is Irish, the lovers are Irish and they begin their story in an Irish community with lots of drinking. Their all-encompassing love is very Irish. However, Tom and Polly are in Butte, a desolate mining town in the mountains of Montana; 1891, a cold winter. So the story is really a western! So far, so terrific.

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Nailing Down the Saint

Nailing Down the Saint, by Craig Cliff

Craig Cliff’s The Mannequin Makers was such a hit for me recently, I thought I’d give another of his books a whirl. Nailing Down the Saint sounded suitably quirky and it is, indeed, a very odd book. Lots of it I just didn’t get. So much of the detail – music, film, cultural – was out of my frame of reference so the nuances skipped past me. Wet Sprocket and heavy metal TOÄD, anyone? George Costanza’s answering-machine message? I didn’t look any of this stuff up, though it might be funny. And the story rambled on for a very long time without me ever really understanding whether the protagonist was winning, whether he was a genius or a sad weirdo, what the point of the story was. But you know what? I loved it. It felt authentic, in a way even the best New Zealand books seldom do.

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The First Law of the Bush – book review

The First Law of the Bush, by Geoff Parkes

I asked my book guru for a book with plot. I’m writing the outline of a potential novel which needs a properly complicated sub-plot – the sort where a bloke does one little thing that he shouldn’t and things snowball dramatically to a killer twist at the end. Not my usual type of writing, or reading for that matter.
“Read The First Law of the Bush,” said Phil. So I did.

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