As Christmas approaches, there is no shortage of new non-fiction to read. Photo / Getty Images
As Christmas approaches, there is no shortage of new non-fiction to read. Photo / Getty Images
In the 1930s, a group of eccentric European exiles seeking utopia went to live on an island in the Galapágos archipelago. Things didn’t go well and there were disappearances and suspicious deaths. Georges Simenon wrote a novel about it and there was a 2013 doco. But Abbott Kahler has, inEden Undone (HarperCollins), written the first comprehensive account of what went on based on diaries and other sources, many previously unpublished. So compelling is the story that it’s already been made into a star-studded movie.
Photo / supplied
Clare Gleeson’s The Fairer Side of Buxton (The Cuba Press) profiles the life and work of Alfred Buxton, one of NZ’s best garden designers. Arriving from England with his family in 1886 aged 14, Alfred would be apprenticed to leading Canterbury nurseryman Thomas Abbott. Buxton went on to design more than 350 gardens over 40 years. One, Greenhill, hosted the Queen Mother; another, at Waikanae, helped painter Rita Angus recover from a breakdown.
Photo / supplied
Art photographer Victoria Ginn calls A Welcome Adventure (Blue Matriarch Productions) “a poetic memoir”. It’s an account of her travels as a 23-year-old through the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1977. The author, who has published books on Afghanistan, and ritual and performance in Asia and the Pacific among others, largely lets the striking photographs speak for themselves.
Photo / supplied
The Europa Clipper is now wending its way to Jupiter’s moon to look for life. In the authoritative The Secret Life of the Universe (Simon & Schuster), leading astrobiologist Nathalie A Cabrol explains how moons such as Europa and planets around other stars might harbour life, given how it likely arose on Earth, and what it might look like.
