Books: Rosie's back, with baby on board

Graeme Simison created the bestselling saga of Rosie and Don.

Sequel continues the adventures of lovelorn Asperger's hero.

The Rosie Effect
By Graeme Simsion (Text)

New Zealand-born Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project was one of the big fiction hits of last year. The story of Professor Don Tillman's quest for a wife was laugh-out-loud funny but a bit of a one-joke wonder - Don is on the Asperger's spectrum and the humour is derived from his oddball but endearing approach to life. So I wasn't convinced the scenario could be stretched to a sequel. In The Rosie Effect, Don is now married to the woman of his dreams and has relocated to New York. Things start going wrong when Rosie becomes pregnant. Thrown by the prospect of fatherhood, Don makes a number of goofs and finds himself in danger of being arrested, deported and worst of all, losing Rosie. It's amusing more than belly-laugh funny but Don's struggle to fit in with "ordinary" society makes for charming reading and the novel has insightful as well as comic moments. The verdict? Probably not as good as The Rosie Project but worth reading.

The Children Act
by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

In London, a boy of 17 is suffering from leukaemia and refusing a blood transfusion for religious reasons. Leading High Court judge Fiona Maye must decide whether to override his wishes. Meanwhile, Fiona's own life is in turmoil as her husband Jack announces his plan to have an affair with a young woman. It sounds like the plot of a Jodi Picoult novel but we are in acclaimed author Ian McEwan's hands and the tale is told in his restrained, precise style. McEwan burrows deep inside the mind of his heroine and is painstaking in his detail of family law. As Fiona grows close to the sick boy and discovers that her own life is not as clear-cut as she imagined, the even tempo of McEwan's prose keeps things clinical. A considered, carefully researched book. Still, if Picoult had written it I suspect I'd have cared more about the characters.

Photography The Definitive Visual History
by Tom Ang (Dorling Kindersley)

Nearly two centuries of capturing images with cameras is covered in this comprehensive coffee table book by Aucklander Tom Ang. He begins with the first fuzzy black-and-white images, and the history of cameras and techniques; looks at the way photography affected society, for example inspiring people to travel; and how it recorded cultures before they disappeared. Gradually, he moves through to the present, when a mind-boggling trillion new photographs are created every year. As much a social history as the record of an art form, it's fascinating and hugely informative stuff. Ang tells a good story and his words opened my eyes to the significance of photography in all our lives. It goes without saying the book is filled with amazing images. In the age of the selfie, it's a reminder of photography's potential to move and change us.

MoVida Solera
By Frank Camorra & Richard Cornish (Penguin Lantern)

This is the fourth Spanish cookbook to come out of acclaimed Melbourne tapas restaurant MoVida, and this time chef Frank Camorra has travelled through Andalusia collecting traditional recipes. The book is sectioned into regions - Seville, Malaga, Cordoba, etc - and has a travelogue feel as he shares the story of each place plus recommendations of where to eat and stay. Among the recipes are home-style dishes you won't find in any Spanish restaurant, such as chicken in saffron, egg and almond sauce. Included are mouth-watering seafood and pork dishes as well as a few that are interesting to read about but we won't be cooking: deep-fried fish bones, I'm looking at you. What I will try are some of the vegetable recipes, in particular the outrageous-sounding sweet potatoes braised with brandy, honey and spices (kumara as dessert) and the beetroot salad, with the classic Andalusian flavour combination of fennel and cumin. This is a big volume and the photography by Alan Benson makes it a thing of beauty. Even if you already have too many cookbooks MoVida Solera is going to be difficult to resist.

H Is For Hawk
by Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape)

It's not often I find non-fiction mesmerising but this is a gripping read. Helen's father has recently died and her way of coping is to shut herself off from her friends and family and buy a goshawk to train. Helen spent her childhood fascinated with the art of training hawks and had already worked with other birds. She is a historian and her knowledge of falconry is immense. Alongside her journey, she regales us with the story of T. H. White, who wrote a classic book in the early 1900s on training his hawk. He described his experience as akin to a spiritual contest and in her current state Helen can sympathise. "To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don't see the hawk's body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away." The book about love and grief as well as the difficult process of training a hawk.

Review by Tracey Lawton of The Village Bookshop in Matakana.

NZ Shore & Sea and NZ Plants
by Dave Gunson (New Holland)

Kiwi kids should love the realistic illustrations and colourful backgrounds of Dave Gunson's board books, featuring shore and sea animals or native plants. The books make a delightful first-birthday present for friends overseas or could be used on treasure hunt walks with toddlers, who can try to spot cabbage trees, manuka, starfish or rock crabs. Each illustration comes with the English and Maori names on the top of each page.

Review by Danielle Wright, creator of award-winning website newsmummy.com