Bryan Walpert. Photo / Supplied
Though a "literary" novel reader, I've been gravitating to books with a speculative element. I'm currently reading and enjoying Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara (Cuba Press). Set with wonderful detail in Auckland, it has a time travel element that is gradually being revealed. The book is character-driven, with a tattoo
artist as narrator, Lestari Aris, who is tough and vulnerable and funny, and whose unresolved family issues are inextricable from the mysterious events she finds herself exploring and with which I find myself fully engaged.
I've just finished The Anomaly, by Herve Le Tellier, translated from French by Adriana Hunter. A plane from Paris lands in New York after going through a storm — but the same plane landed with the same people on it several months before. The book is a thought experiment with a compelling narrative drive and speculative scientific basis. A social satire, handled with an enviably light touch, it has received international acclaim and in France won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
Having enjoyed American author Richard Powers' sprawling environmental novel, The Overstory, I jumped into his much leaner Booker-shortlisted Bewilderment, about the ameliorating effects of an experimental scientific treatment on the astrobiologist narrator's son, a bullied child who thinks and feels more deeply than most (notably about environmental issues). And I couldn't put down Pakistani and British author Mohsin Hamid's Exit West. It's a few years old (also Booker shortlisted), but then I'm always catching up and endlessly behind. Yet another character-driven thought experiment: a set of seemingly magic doors permit a couple from an unnamed country heading towards civil war to travel to Greece, England and the US — along with many others, leading to tensions between suddenly appearing refugees and nativists. It is a compelling novel about what it is to be displaced and how countries might engage with societal change.
And what's the reading life without a book of poems or six on the go as well? I'm enjoying Australia-based New Zealander Jennifer Compton's The Moment, Taken (Recent Work Press), with its characteristic mix of sharp wit, deep feeling and striking images, e.g. the speaker "knitting up the scarf / of memory", as well as Joanna Preston's Tumble (Otago University Press), her starlings beautifully "anchoring night / with their feet".
