New Zealand women writers' rich crop of debut novels and memoirs defies lockdown restrictions

Lil O'Brien - author of Not That I'd Kiss A Girl.

Paula Morris on winter's rich crop of local debut novels.

Despite this year's lockdown crisis – bookshops closed, launches and festivals cancelled, cartons of books stranded in overseas ports and warehouses – a slew of local women writers have managed to make confident debuts. These recent arrivals – two new memoirs and four novels – vary in style and tone but all explore secret lives, life-changing events and traumatic consequences.

This doesn't mean any of these new books are earnest. Honest, funny memoir Not That I'd Kiss a Girl by Lil O'Brien (Allen & Unwin) is billed as a "coming out and coming of age" story that's both personal and charts the cultural shift in New Zealand over the past 20 years. The memoir's focus on the confusion of coming out "timestamps the story," says reviewer Ruby Porter, "as much as the 'hologram orange' ball dresses, the all-caps all-contractions text speak and Nelly's 'Ride wit Me'. And, as you would hope, the early 2000s gay content is all there: message boards with online lovers, Tumblr feeds of kissing girls, The L Word."

O'Brien excels, she suggests, in capturing "the intensity of young love, imperceptible shifts in power, what remains of memories which have been lost to shock." Making sense of shock also lies at the heart of Caroline Barron's Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death (Bateman) – part recovery account from PTSD, part detective story into murky family pasts, including prison spells and dishonourable discharges.

Kate Duignan, reviewing the book for the Academy of New Zealand Literature, praises Barron's "lucid, visceral prose" in a memoir that doesn't shy from brutal truths. "The aftermath of a terrible birth, and the damage of her grandparents' lives read as parallel investigations into the link between being a person who undergoes trauma, and being a person capable of violent rage. The overriding question of the memoir becomes a matter of survival for Barron: "Why am I like I am?"

That question of how families make and break us is also explored in The Swimmers (VUP) by Chloe Lane, a debut novel that's timely in its story of the complex decisions and chaotic emotions around euthanasia. Set over five intense days, when a fractured family gather at what's left of the family farm in Northland to make peace, make war and break the law, The Swimmers is an intense, moving and darkly comic story about unrepentant, difficult women.

Dark comedy around mental and physical health weaves through the three storylines in Amy McDaid's buoyant debut Fake Baby (Penguin): itinerant Stephen, on the run from doctors and police; pharmacist Lucas in the eye of a mixed-meds storm; and Jaanvi, recovering from the death of her baby by carrying around the sinister doll of the title. "We are all capable of self-deception and the line between mental anguish and mental illness is sometimes slim," writes Mark Broatch. "Amongst the grief and pain [in Fake Baby] is a lot of humour, dry and well-observed, about relationships and society's tutting expectations."

Already a local sales sensation, with UK and US deals signed and a film option sold, Rose Carlyle's The Girl in the Mirror (Allen & Unwin) is the most commercial of this tranche of debuts. A compelling psychological thriller about twin sisters, Summer and Iris, set in a world of luxury yachts, beautiful people, bitter rivalries and family fortunes, it's the only book here set entirely outside New Zealand. "With shades of Dead Ringers and The Talented My Ripley," reviewer Sally Blundell writes, "the plot charges towards the dramatic denouement like a sloop on a trade wind as the true natures of Summer and Iris and the madness inspired by a cruel and unethical inheritance become apparent."

McDaid and Carlyle were classmates in the 2017 Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, along with P.J. McKay, another of this winter's debut authors. The Telling Time (Polako Press) – winner of the international First Pages Prize for its stunning opening – is the only historical novel in this group, and its history is recent. The story of a mother and daughter divided by secrets from the old world, McKay's novel moves between the late-50s – in hard-scrabble old Yugoslavia and "Dally" suburbia in Auckland – and the late-80s, when a young woman roams the powder-keg Balkans in search of her roots. We still have too few Croatian NZ novels, especially ones with this much style and substance.
*Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai) is a fiction writer and essayist and the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature, where reviews of all these books appear: www.anzliterature.com