Books for Blokes – Cristina Sanders' blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Curiosity – Book review

The Curiosity, by Stephan Kiernan

I’m going to give a bookie suggestion right up front. If you’re keen on reading a great story where we bring a man back to life from history, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is the one. It was one of my favourite books of 2024. Stephan Kiernan’s The Curiosity was published a decade earlier, same sort of story, with a modern woman falling for a reanimated gent with all his old-fashioned charms, but it has none of the raunchy chemistry that makes Bradley’s book such a hit. The Curiosity is interesting in parts, but…

The Mannequin Makers – book review

The Mannequin Makers, by Craig Cliff

I’m always delighted when I find a terrific New Zealand historical fiction from the past that I’ve missed. The Mannequin Makers was published in 2013 by Penguin and now on my list of top NZ hist fict to recommend. This is no sweeping saga of real events, rather a strange small town rivalry that mostly takes place in a shop window. With mannequins. Sounds quirky? Well, yes, in the sense that the story is unconventional and miles away from the usual immigrant saga, but it thankfully misses all the usual shit that comes with ‘quirky’, there is no manufactured cheesiness or forced charm, no ‘found family’ of misfits. Craig Cliff soars above all that.

Caledonian Road

Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan

Well, I’m glad that’s over. I took up the challenge of Caledonian Road on the advice of a writer I admire tremendously and who shall remain nameless and cast into the darkness where people who recommend painful books live. Caledonian Road goes on for six-hundred-and-forty pages, robbing me of time I could have spent with a more enjoyable book. I thought it might be one of those stories that will suddenly click as the characters step off the page and beseech me to care about them. Didn’t happen. So why is it on my recommended reading list?

Cloud Cuckoo Land – book review

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

It took me a couple of attempts to get into Cloud Cuckoo Land, and I feel no shame in giving up initially after the first few chapters because there are half a dozen seemingly unrelated stories going forward or backward in different times and vastly different locations. If you want a put-down-and-pick-up story, this is not the right book for now. I came back with more patience, reread from the start and was slowly hooked. It’s absolutely worth the effort, but…
I’ll explain.

So Late in the Day – book review

So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan

Cathal is one of those blokes a friend might go out with and say, you know, he’s OK. He’s got a job, not bad looking. We meet Cathal looking out of his office window where the day is good: sunshine; birds; the smell of cut grass; “so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.” Cathal is writing rejection letters for bursary applicants. And there we have it, Keegan gives us the heads up that this is not a happily-ever-after. In this poignant novella, the fact that Cathal is not one of life’s winners is revealed through the world around him.

A Marriage at Sea – book review

A marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey are an odd couple. “Love, when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke,” and that is certainly the case in this story. He is eccentric, moody, lacking confidence. Several years older, his life is narrowing and “loneliness had closed around him like a case”. She “coloured in his gaps“. Lucky him. She’s terrific, outgoing, brave and smart. But Maralyn falls in love with Maurice, and it feels true. For some reason, women seem to love an oddball.

They go sailing to get away from the confines of their English life and, in a move that seems inevitable for the pair, sell the bungalow, have a boat built to their specifications and head off into the blue. They’re running away from a difficult England where they feel they don’t fit, and New Zealand is the chosen destination, via a long ocean voyage. They leave in the summer to catch the trade winds across the Atlantic. I was quickly caught up in this story, always a sucker for a tale of life at sea but also I wanted to find out how long it would take for Maralyn to throw Maurice overboard.

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