If you missed it when it was released last year, don't do so again. It's been named the winner of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and it's a deserved winner.
Based on the true story of Auckland's "Jukebox killer", Albert Black, a young Irish immigrant who came to New Zealand hoping to start a new life and ended up hanging for murder at Mt Eden prison in 1955. Black's execution occurred at a fraught time politically and socially. Hard to picture now but the concern over teen culture — Marlon Brando and James Dean, movies, Elvis and Mickey Spillane novels — escalated into a sort of moral panic especially when it came to outsiders like this good-looking immigrant.
This is a meticulously researched novel which holds up a dark part of our history to the light but, as good a historian as Kidman is, she's a novelist first. She expertly brings readers into the lives of all those involved, and doesn't forget the dodgy political machinations of Justice Minister Jack Marshall and PM Sid Holland.
THIS MORTAL BOY
by Fiona Kidman
(Vintage, $30)
