Canvas books wrap: Inside Qatar by John McManus, Notes on Womanhood by Sarah Jane Barnett, and more

An aerial view of Qatar's Khalifa Stadium stadium at sunrise. Photo / Getty Images

Can the richest nation in the world per capita protect its image? Before the 2022 World Cup, a new book is poised to hinder it. Elsewhere, a poignant memoir probes the female experience, and why it's time to revisit the glittering, tragic world of Gatsby. Happy reading.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Inside Qatar by John McManus (Icon, available online from shop.timeout.co.nz, $25)

Perched on top of the world's largest natural gas fields, the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar is living, swaggering proof that money can't quite buy everything in life.

With approximately £370 billion ($720b) in its sovereign wealth fund, it's the richest nation in the world per capita. And over the years, it has splashed its cash everywhere - packing its streets with Ferraris and bling hotels, and buying up prime global landmarks - in London alone, both Harrods and the Shard. Yet despite hiring droves of expensive PR firms from London and New York, it has not been able to buy good headlines for its biggest vanity project of all: the 2022 World Cup. Before it hosts the 2022 World Cup, Qatar desperately wants positive headlines. This exposé won't help.Read Colin Freeman's full story here

JUST OUT

Just what does it mean to be a woman in 2022? Sarah Jane Barnett started exploring the question after having a hysterectomy. Her memoir, Notes on Womanhood (Otago University Press, $30), interrogates beauty ideals, ageing, the male gaze, care work and other aspects of the female experience. Barnett's father Nikki came out as transgender in her 60s, which adds another dimension to Barnett's work. She says, "My father did have a lived experience of womanhood, and it was one totally different to my own."

One of the country's most beloved children's author-illustrators is back with Squawk!: Donovan Bixley's Forest Birds of Aotearoa (Hachette Aotearoa NZ, $25) This bright and cheerful picture book takes kids on a journey through the bush identifying and appreciating native birds of the present and past, including the moa and kākāpō.

In Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant (The Cuba Press, $37), Cristina Sanders imagines what happened to the survivors of a real-life late 19th century shipwreck who ended up in the remote subantarctic Auckland Islands for 18 months. This is Sanders' third historical novel. Her YA novel Displaced won the Storylines Tessa Duder Award in 2020.

TRY THIS CLASSIC

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin, $18). By Eleanor Black

Published in 1926, The Great Gatsby casts a critical eye over consumer culture, the sometimes cruel carelessness of the ultra-wealthy and the roles we try to impose on others. It captures the sparkling giddiness of the Jazz Age in clear-eyed, beautiful prose and it is a stonking story that has inspired filmmakers and other creatives for nearly 100 years.

The novel feels oddly relevant right now, as the world economy appears to teeter on the edge of a precipice, human rights are stripped away from citizens like cardigans, and the ultra-wealthy who might contribute to significant change instead undertake vanity projects like heading into space.

Jay Gatsby is your classic makeover after-picture. He has risen from an impoverished, mysterious background to a position of incredible wealth. He hosts lavish all-night parties at his mansion, drives around in a beautiful beast of a car, and collects leather-bound books he'll never read. This is all in pursuit of his first love, Daisy Buchanan, now married to a class-A jerk who mocks Gatsby's clothes and mannerisms: "An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit."

The story – glamorous, tragic – is told through the filter of Nick Carraway, a far less wealthy but more socially secure man than Gatsby, who befriends him over the course of one significant summer. Carraway is dazzled by Gatsby's lifestyle, and even when he becomes aware of his criminal activities, he always assumes the best of him. It's a fascinating friendship that manages to be both superficial and life-changing.

The book, short enough to be read in one or two sittings, is rich with symbolism and meaning. It tackles, with varying degrees of seriousness, sexism, racism and classism as well as the emptiness of the supposedly non-hierarchical American Dream, which favours some people over others.

"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves… and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."