Mark Broatch checks out five promising titles from first-time novelists.
Freddie Gillies’ previous book was The Big Bike Trip, an account of a bicycle tour from Indonesia to England he took with friends in 2017. His latest is a novel, Because All Fades (Bateman Books), which explores the relationships of two Kiwi couples on a trip to Italy. Gillies graduated from the University of Auckland with degrees in arts and commerce. He’s now in London and working for a tech company. In the novel, out next week, 20-somethings Andrew and Jess are grinding their way through their professional careers in England and their relationship has hit a rough patch. Andrew’s friend Jaryd, a charismatic live wire, and his partner Liv, meanwhile, are living their best lives in Paris. Their business venture has gone global. The chance to have a bit of fun with them on an Italian road trip is impossible to pass up. Thanks to the prologue, we know disaster will strike, friendships will be tested and secrets forced into the open. The novel, a kind of psychological thriller full of subtle dialogue and effective revelations, explores the shakiness of happiness, male emotional repression and delayed adulthood.
Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, launched the Australian writer and hers became one of the most famous names in the country’s literature, adorning one of its most prestigious awards, the Miles Franklin Award. Melbourne-based Kiwi Amy Brown, a teacher, poet and children’s author, has taken elements of Franklin’s story for her first adult novel, My Brilliant Sister (Simon & Schuster), which is also released next week. Miles, whose given name was Stella, led a bohemian life and travelled the world. Her sister Linda followed a more conventional, briefer path. Brown reimagines their lives and that of a contemporary figure, Ida – a Kiwi teacher and mother enduring repeated Australian lockdowns. Across three narratives, it explores a woman’s place in the world – marriage, motherhood, creativity – and lives not lived, roads not taken. It’s a novel fascinated with language and writerly concerns, full of articulate conversations and alert to the preoccupations of expats.
“In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely.” So runs the marketing for When I Open the Shop (Te Herenga Waka University Press), the debut novel of Romesh Dissanayake, a Wellington writer of Sri Lankan and Koryo-Saram (Central Asia-based ethnic Korean) background. Dissanayake won the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize from Wellington’s IIML writing school. The novel, out in mid-March, delivers a snaking, wry, sometimes surreal tale about food, drinking, the “where are you from” immigrant experience, love and lots of other stuff. “I’m not much of a dancer. In fact, I’m no dancer at all. My body doesn’t seem to want to move in that way. You need to move your hips more, and less arms. For sure, less arms: that’s what a girl once told me at a Mint Chicks gig at the Kings Arms Tavern, her face screwed up and sour. I haven’t dared to dance since.”
Out later this month is Erin Palmisano’s The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna (Moa Press). Palmisano, a NZ-US citizen who lives in Nelson with her chef partner, has combined food, wine and travel in a sunny novel with all the ingredients of a romcom.
In a small village on the island of Naxos, a whitewashed taverna and guest house, all bougainvillea and lemon trees, sits empty. It had been Cressida Thermopolis’s dream to have guests and feed them delicious Greek food. But her husband, Leo, has died aged just 27, and Cressida is at a loss. Which is when young American Jory St James arrives late one night off the ferry and becomes her first guest. Can the two women breathe life back into the little Greek taverna? Will the ever-wandering Jory find love? This is a novel with a heart as big as the Aegean, where the magic of luck and fate is always in the air, electric currents flow between people, where crisp white sheets cover gloriously soft beds, so it’s probably a safe bet.
Late in March arrives Saraid de Silva’s Amma (Moa Press). Auckland-based de Silva, of Sri Lankan-Pākehā ancestry, co-created RNZ’s Conversations with My Immigrant Parents podcast, presenting discussions “about love, ancestry, home, food, expectation and acceptance”. Amma is interested in these topics, too, centring on three generations of women. The story easily crosses decades, continents and generations, gathering in love and loss, change and culture shock, secrets and surprises and moments of tragedy. Unsurprisingly, given that she was a winner of the University of Auckland’s Crystal Arts Trust Prize, the writing is assured, the characterisation nuanced, the similes alive. “Amma is frowning into the pantry. She is beautiful, although she doesn’t seem to care. She has wide eyes and full rose lips, a nipped waist and tiny ankles. Men’s eyes follow her with reverence and a touch of resignation, like she is someone else’s Christmas present. Male grocery clerks hold her bags a little too close to their chest, so that Amma has to lean forward and brush their fingers with her own to retrieve her things.”
