Author Catherine Chidgey.
2022 has been a mixed bag that many will be glad to see the back of, but we have read some stunning books. Here is a selection of the very best, reviewed by Kiran Dass, David Herkt and Kelly Ana Morey
The Axeman’s Carnival
by Catherine Chidgey
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
No surprises here that one of our very best novelists knocks it out of the park yet again with her latest novel, which has just hit the shelves. In anyone else’s hands the premise, a precocious magpie who narrates a darkly funny tale of love, revenge and the weirdness of social media with all of the verve of a well-rehearsed stand-up comic, would be twee as hell. But such is Chidgey’s mastery in wrangling words and complex ideas that the anthropomorphisation of Tama the magpie, apart from the primary literary conceit of him being the narrator, exists on the page embedded into both character and plot, rather than in the voice of the novel. Sometimes it’s pretty cute, but a lot of the time it’s not. - Kelly Ana Morey
Milk Teeth
by Jessica Andrews
(Sceptre, $38)
Saltwater, by Jessica Andrews, was my novel of 2019 and her lush follow-up, Milk Teeth, hits the same sublime notes. Exploring similar themes of class, precarity and place, Andrews also looks at escape - both physical and emotional. Set in North-east England, London, Barcelona, rural Spain and Paris, our unnamed narrator takes us through sizzling hot and dusty secluded beaches, grimy pubs, chip shops, rain-slicked city streets and glitter-filled parties as she grapples with relationships, body image, and the learned behaviour of not wanting to take up space. A beautiful summer read, this novel has such a finely tuned sense of place and is a gorgeous sensory overload with evocative scenes of eating tinned peaches on the beach, to the pine and wild rosemary-infused air in Spain. Strikingly, Milk Teeth is also a reminder of how it is still relatively rare to read about the lives of working-class women in literary fiction. - Kiran Dass
Still Life
by Sarah Winman
(4th Estate, $35)
All right, it’s true – this book came out in 2021 but Sarah Winman’s wonderful “big old queer novel”, got me reading new fiction again this year after judging the fiction category for the New Zealand Book Awards left me with a serious case of burnout and unable to read anything except ancient Vanity Fair articles about rich people behaving badly in the olden times. I loved this novel to bits. It’s a funny, joyful, hopeful and happy-sad story about a group of glorious characters from London’s East End who go to Florence after World War II either permanently, or at least very regularly, and find their joy. A celebration of love in all its manifestations, I confess I cried happy tears almost as often as I laughed out loud. But I also really loved how clever it was too - there’s this wonderful thread about the Florentine novel that references A Room With A View and Henry James. Such a great writer, and I can’t wait to read her first three novels. - Kelly Ana Morey
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
(Pan Macmillan, $50)
Just released, this is the celebrated 89-year-old writer’s first novel since his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road. Bobby Western is a salvage diver in the Gulf of Mexico commissioned to investigate a small, downed charter jet. Eight dead passengers are still belted in their seats amid floating cabin detritus. The manifest, however, states that there should be nine … It’s a hallucinatory book, spinning over the Southeast United States and even further into psychic territory. There is the A-bomb, family history, thalidomide, the Kennedy assassinations and theoretical physics. It should be a hot mess of a novel – and maybe it is – but there are many masterful moments of writing. - David Herkt
Tauhou
by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
The last three or four years have been amazing for Māori writing and the last 12 months have been the strongest showing yet, with a large number of books published across most publishing houses and Māori writers dominating the bestseller lists. I was ready for some poetry and magic, so really loved Kotuku Titihuia Nuttall’s collection of prose poem-esque short stories that draw on her Māori and First Nations whakapapa and history. There are bits of them – themes, characters, ideas and small perfectly distilled moments of clarity – that have stayed with me. The First Nations needle and thread tattooing method, the city that floats above and below the rising sea, the artist and her muse and the children being taken from their parents and sent to residential boarding schools. - Kelly Ana More
Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan
(Faber, $25)
Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, this beautifully observed novella was also shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Spare and exacting, it’s set in 1985 in a small Irish village in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It follows the quiet daily life of Bill Furlong, a timber and coal merchant going about his deliveries around the tight-knit community when he discovers a young unwed mother cowering in a convent coal house on the edge of town. She’s a victim of the Catholic church’s Magdalene Laundries, the last of which was only closed down in 1996. Looking at hypocrisy, silence, complicity and compassion, the message is loud and clear here, though, that people can be, and can do good, and asks us, is there any point in being alive if we can’t help each other? - Kiran Dass
Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand
by Nick Bollinger
(Auckland University Press, $50)
Nick Bollinger’s latest is social history as it should be written. From the 1950s through the “Summer of Love” in the late 1960s to the collapse of its ideals amid the Mr Asia heroin epidemic in the mid-1970s, Bollinger confronts the era as an embedded historian, interrogating both his own memories and the available archives. It is copiously illustrated from every conceivable visual source with innumerable photographs, underground magazine-covers, and album sleeves. - David Herkt
The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives
by Jude Rogers
(White Rabbit, $38)
Seamlessly blending memoir, sociology, neuroscience and fandom studies, music journalist Jude Rogers asks why music makes such an indelible imprint on us at all stages of life. Framed around 12 pivotal songs from different stages of her life, from Abba’s Super Trouper, Neneh Cherry’s incendiary Buffalo Stance, Drive by REM to Among Angels by Kate Bush and Heat Wave by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Rogers explores the death of her beloved pop music-loving father when she was 5 years old and the music that served as a companion through immense grief. A fascinating deep dive into the transportative nature of music, Rogers beautifully presents the idea that songs carry little parts of ourselves and offer not only connection, but a way for us to tell the story of our own lives. - Kiran Dass
Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939-1954
by David Dawson and Martin Gayford
(Thames & Hudson, $145)
Love Lucian lays good claim to being the year’s most beautiful book. Wonderful reproductions of Lucian Freud’s letters with their quick sketches and graphic emotions are supplemented by images of his paintings, photographs, and a knowledgeable biographical text. His vivid, clear handwriting and page decorations convey the immediacy of teenage life as the wayward, unmanageable grandson of Sigmund Freud, then his many love affairs, the years of poverty stalking about wartime London, his travels to Paris, Greece and Crete, and his two marriages … It’s an expensive volume but worth every dollar. - David Herkt
Getting Lost
by Annie Ernaux
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, $33)
French writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, only the 17th woman out of 119 laureates in the award’s history. Her radical work of collective memoirs, The Years, remains one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. While The Years is outward-gazing, Getting Lost is a personal diarised account of an intense affair Ernaux had with a younger, married Russian diplomat in 1989. Written with the hard clarity of a reporter’s eye, this raw and bracing book illuminates the parts of women’s lives that are still so often kept hidden. - Kiran Dass
Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar: A window into Miocene Zealandia
by Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss and John Conran
(Otago University Press, $60)
Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar: A window into Miocene Zealandia might sound obscure, but it examines the 23-million-year-old remains of an Otago lake that is in danger of being mined for industrial use. The sediments capture a long-gone world, unique in the Southern Hemisphere. Featured photographs of fossil plants, insects, spiders, flowers, and fish – all perfectly preserved by the ancient anaerobic lake – are almost artworks in themselves. It’s a book whose account of the excavations, the people, and the discoveries deserves attention. There is already evidence of lake birds but discovering their first fossil remains will be an international game-changer. - David Herkt
Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988
by Matthew Goody
(Auckland University Press, $70)
Every music lover ought to put this hefty and lavishly produced discographic account of the early formative Christchurch years of legendary Aotearoa record label Flying Nun on their Chrimbo wishlist this year. This epic and meticulously researched book took Canadian writer Matthew Goody 10 years to write. Moving chronologically through the 7″'s, EPs and albums over this inventive seven-year period, the book starts with The Clean’s debut single Tally Ho! and concludes with Bird Dog by The Verlaines. Goody writes about the people behind the music, the backstory of each release, and the result is a tribute to an imaginative and artistic community of people who made music with and shared music with friends while putting Aotearoa music on the world stage. - Kiran Dass
The Surgeon’s Brain
by Oscar Upperton
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)
The New Zealand poetry book of the year is undoubtedly Oscar Upperton’s The Surgeon’s Brain. It is a narrative poem in sections, relating the life of Dr James Barry in the early 19th century. Barry was a duellist, a grudge-holder, as well as a brilliant and humane surgeon in South Africa, the West Indies and Corfu, with ideas far in advance of his times, a fact that won him no friends. Barry had also been born Margaret Anne Bulkley. Filled with vivid shards of perception, bright exotic light and slants of life, Upperton’s book is an extraordinary achievement that should immediately rank him as New Zealand’s finest poet. - David Herkt
The Waste Land: The Biography of a Poem
by Matthew Hollis
(W.W. Norton & Company, $64)
In The Waste Land: The Biography of a Poem, Matthew Hollis snapshots the people, places, and times around the creation of that great Modernist masterpiece. The failure of the American banker/poet T.S. Eliot’s marriage to his wife, Vivian, lies at the book’s heart but it also conveys the almost psychic twinship between Eliot and Ezra Pound, a fellow American expatriate writer in Continental Europe in the early 1920s. Bloomsbury features heavily – Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf – as well as all the literary gossip, drama, affairs, and heady ferment of one of the great eras of English literature. It’s a book that deserves a Netflix miniseries. - David Herkt
Jarna Mihaere weighs 165kg, and he needed all of that.