We’re only halfway through the year, but already a collection of great yarns, absorbing, literature, brilliant memoirs and big ideas have grabbed our undivided attention.
Thrills & chills
The Call (A&U), a deft and accomplished debut novel from NZ screenwriter Gavin Strawhan, has an eye to current issues and a magnetic detective lead. DSS Hana Westerman is back in Return to Blood (S&S), Michael Bennett’s confident sequel to the bestselling Better the Blood, which welcomes new characters and has an unexpected ending. In JP Pomare’s 17 Years Later (Hachette), out on July 31, a prison psychologist and true-crime podcaster try to find out who really killed the wealthy Primrose family. How far do you go to save your family is canvassed in Home Truths (A&U) by Kiwi Charity Norman, out on July 30, which features former probation officer Livia Denby, who is on trial for attempted murder.
Everybody Knows (Faber) by Jordan Harper is a top-notch thriller that journeys into the sordid, moneyed world of Hollywood and its fixers after an apparently random killing of a PR boss. Don Winslow’s City in Ruins (HarperCollins), a fitting swansong to his Danny Ryan trilogy and probably his writing career, is an ambitious tale that weaves together a clutch of storylines. In Devil’s Kitchen (Bantam), Candice Fox has conjured an action-packed tale of a female undercover agent infiltrating a deadly gang of New York firefighters and thieves. James Lee Burke’s Clete (Orion) brings Clete Purcel, sidekick to Burke’s Cajun investigator Dave Robicheaux, to centre stage in a gripping story of dogged sleuthing. You Like It Darker (Hachette) is a first-rate compilation of short stories from master of horror Stephen King, some new and some older but uncollected.
Sunday afternoon reads
You Are Here (Hachette) is a genuinely charming and cheering story by David Nicholls, the author of One Day, of a lonely Englishman and woman who are thrown together on an epic walk across the northern English countryside. In Tracy Chevalier’s latest historical novel The Glassmaker (HarperCollins) the daughter from a 15th-century Venetian glassmaking family defies convention – and the normal passing of time. Robert Harris’s Precipice (Penguin), out on August 27, is the based-on-truth tale of UK prime minister HH Asquith, who, as he led his country into war in 1914, was having a relationship with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley, and revealing to her sensitive political matters. Caledonian Road (Faber) is an epic social satire of modern London by Andrew O’Hagan with a large, multilayered cast, all connected to the borough of Islington, crossed by the historic road of the title.
The Mess We Made (Moa), out on July 30, is the debut novel from Kiwi Megan O’Neill about childhood sweethearts who have a second chance at love. The Ministry of Time (Hachette) is Kaliane Bradley’s brilliantly written and genuinely funny romp across genres, including time-travel romcom and comedy of manners, in which people from the past are brought into the London of the present day.
Steven Carroll’s Death of a Foreign Gentleman (4th Estate) is a literary crime novel that tries to discover, in Cambridge 1947, who killed the German philosopher, former Nazi and all-round scumbag Martin Friedrich.
Chewy fiction
In Long Island (Picador), set two decades after the end of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns to New York and Ireland to discover what happened to Eilis Lacey. Burma Sahib (Hamish Hamilton) is Paul Theroux’s vividly imagined account of why a teenaged Eric Blair decided to become an imperial police officer in Burma rather than go up from Eton to the University of Oxford.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (Granta), a moving story of love and betrayal involving a young student and an older married man set against the fall of the Berlin Wall, took out the International Booker Prize. In Lauren Keenan’s captivating historical novel The Space Between (Penguin), two outsider women are connected by one man with a backdrop of the weeks before the outbreak of the Taranaki Land Wars.
Kiwi Saraid de Silva’s debut Amma (Moa) is an excellent multi-generational, decade-shifting, continent-crossing tale. Out on October 1 is the latest epic from Australian author Tim Winton, Juice (Penguin), in which a man and a child, both fugitives, arrive at an abandoned mine site and have to survive and maintain their humanity. In Tina Makereti’s The Mires (Ultimo), out later this month, three women and their children become neighbours in a coastal town in NZ, but when one family’s son comes home unexpectedly, the tension and danger begin to build.
Mania (HarperCollins) is another inventive satire from Lionel Shriver, taking place in a near future where intellectual merit is considered heresy and dumbing down is taken to its logical extreme. The Honeyeater (A&U) by Jessie Tu is a compelling and unsettling story that blows the whistle on the seemingly genteel worlds of literary academia and Asian Gen-Z women. In Carys Davies’ Clear (A&U), a minister is sent to remove a lone tenant from his remote Scottish island, but after an accident, events take an unexpected turn. Out on September 24 is Sally Rooney’s much-awaited Intermezzo (Faber), the Normal People author’s story of two very different Dublin brothers grieving their father’s death and finding their way through love.
The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli (Pushkin), recently translated into English, is a clever tale of power and contemporary Russia, in which Vladimir Putin’s (fictional) spin doctor tells his story. Out October 8 is Our Evenings (Pan Macmillan), by Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst, a darkly funny portrait of modern England through the eyes of one man, traversing race and class, love, sexuality and violence.
In At the Grand Glacier Hotel (Penguin), by Laurence Fearnley, a couple’s long-awaited holiday turns into a thoughtful, unsentimental, hopeful investigation of mortality. Sinéad Gleeson’s Hagstone (4th Estate) is an atmospheric look at community, solitude, faith and the natural world through an artist living on a remote island off Ireland’s rugged west coast.
Human stories
In My Time of Dying (Fourth Estate) is renowned journalist and documentary maker Sebastian Junger’s account of how an aneurysm nearly killed him, and while on the operating table he, an atheist, had a near-death spiritual experience. Knife (Jonathan Cape) is not just a wry, lucid and brave telling of Salman Rushdie’s near-fatal stabbing but an imagined dialogue with his attacker, a eulogy for friends and contemporaries, and a love story, the novelist having quietly got married in the years before the attack.
The Last Secret Agent (A&U), by Pippa Latour and Jude Dobson, is a rattling and, at times, genuinely unnerving first-hand account of the perilous life of a female spy in wartime France, from the unassuming Latour, who spent the last 50 years of her life in NZ and died only last year.
In The Life of Dai (HarperCollins), Kiwi comic Dai Henwood’s diagnosis of stage 4 cancer sets the stage for an open-hearted examination of mortality and spirituality, but also family, friends and comedy. Hine Toa (HarperCollins) is a vital memoir from emeritus professor Ngahuia te Awekotuku, who was at the very centre of the country’s women’s, gay and Māori liberation movements. Airini Beautrais, best known for Bug Week, her award-winning collection of short stories, delivers in The Beautiful Afternoon (THWUP) a book of personal essays concerning literature, religion, media, and so on, that are conversational, discursive but deeply examined.
First Things: A Memoir (THWUP) by Wellington poet and former academic Harry Ricketts is a lucid memoir of his first three decades, one full of books, cricket and stories, as he leaves the UK for the Antipodes. When the British writer Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, she started to investigate the long association of paradise and gardens, through Milton, John Clare, Derek Jarman and others. The result is The Garden against Time (Picador), out in August.
Engaging your brain
In The Light Eaters (Fourth Estate) award-winning science writer Zoë Schlanger investigates in fascinating detail the senses of plants – they can “talk”, “hear”, count, decode signals from their surrounds and act in their own best interest. Borderlines (Hachette), by political analyst Lewis Baston, is a history of Europe through its internal borders, almost all of which have been created by accident or force.
In Melting Point (Wildfire), Rachel Cockerell creates an intensely researched and radically constructed account of her grandfather, who persuaded thousands of Russian Jews to flee to Texas in the lead-up to World War I.
Historian Anthony Bale’s A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages (Viking) is a rich exploration, and one of enormous fun, of how and why medieval people travelled – largely for pilgrimage, trade and politics. In Our Moon (Hachette), science writer Rebecca Boyle has produced a fascinating, elegantly written account of our natural satellite, its birth, huge effects on life, mythologies, calendars and its future given space flight. When the Clock Broke by John Ganz (Macmillan) is an insightful investigation of how events following the end of the administration of Ronald Reagan have led to America’s current political and social turbulence.
For Younger People
The Grimmelings by Rachael King (A&U), her first book for a decade, is set in glitteringly evoked South Island high country. It’s a great fusion of ultra-real and spooky. Six-Legged Ghosts by Lily Duval (Canterbury University Press) is an informative and lovingly produced exploration of the unique insects of this country. Nine Girls by Stacy Gregg (Penguin) is quite different from her bestselling, award-winning horse story books. A peeved Auckland teen returns to her mother’s home town of Ngāruawāhia, divided by race and a river. There’s a mystery, tapu and a talking eel.
