I've just read Elizabeth Smither's new short story collection, The Piano Girls. The images that grab you in Smither's poetry are equally striking in this sixth prose selection, along with her characteristic mischief, subversive empowerment of the disadvantaged; and deep, often lyrical compassion.
There's mortality, skin loss, a glass toomany, a baking night, a tricky restaurant party. Being lucky enough to know some of the stories behind the fiction makes it fascinating to see their transformation and elevation here.
We're lucky in New Zealand to have publishers like Penguin Random House, Scholastic, One Tree House, Mary Egan et al who keep the children's and YA market well stocked with local names.
Lit Stories From Home, edited by Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, is one such title: 16 stories aimed particularly at high school students, with authors from Mansfield and Sargeson through Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Tracey Slaughter, to new pens on the block like Gina Cole, Nithya Narayanan and Ting J. Yiu. Varied and vivid. A promising lad called Owen Marshall, rather in the news just now, is there, too.
Glyn Harper is one of the country's most productive military historians, and his new The Front Line, compiled with wife Susan Lemish, is hundreds of images showing New Zealanders at war, 1939-1945.
Soldiers and nurses, sailors and WAACs, airmen and POWs and civilians fill photos which are often startling (German forces moving into Poland on horseback); poignant (an enemy soldier captured in North Africa, frightened and exhausted and only 15 years old); revelatory (who knew one Kiwi had joined a SS unit?). Linked by a text that is concise and authoritative.
Coast Watcher, by David Hill. Photo / Supplied
Coastwatcher, by David Hill (Penguin, $20), is out now.
