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1.(2) The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour and Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin)
It’s 80 years since D-Day. Pippa Latour, who died in West Auckland late last year aged 102, helped lay the groundwork for the operation’s success by acting as a secret agent in France for Britain during World War II.
“I was not a James Bond-style spy,” said Latour. “I was a secret agent whose job it was to blend into the background and cause quiet chaos.” It was exhausting work; she was unable to trust anyone, had several code names, and was often hungry. It was desperately perilous, too. Many of the 13,000 agents were killed, including 14 women out of 39 in France. The average life expectancy of male wireless operators in France when she served was six weeks. Latour’s was a truly remarkable life all around, and The Last Secret Agent, co-written with Jude Dobson, is a clear and fluent account. You can read more about the book here.
2.(1) The Life of Dai by Dai Henwood (HarperCollins)
For a long time, comedian Dai Henwood never told anyone he had incurable cancer. He was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in April 2020, during lockdown, and told a small group of friends via WhatsApp. Turns out the large tumour found had circulated itself to his liver and beyond. It was not until early 2023 that he went public via a TV interview with his friend, comedy writer and actor Jaquie Brown. The Life of Dai, written with Brown, came out of interviews done between chemo sessions in 2023. Unsurprisingly, it’s anything but linear, Dai-gressive even. Split into three sections called Comedy, Love and Peace, it’s half memoir, half spiritual search-cum-life advice for those going through cancer diagnosis and treatment. It begins with his early life and influences, Monty Python, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams. He was a comedy geek. There is his father, the teacher-turned-toxicologist-turned-actor, his mother the judge, who underwrote his early shows. Despite the subject, the tone is generally light, honest, loving in his familiar style. He adores his wife, his children, his friends. Loves rugby league. The book doesn’t shy from details of the “horrendous, life-saving poison” that is chemotherapy, the surgeries, his fear and anger and acceptance. “I’ve made the conscious decision to live now.”
3. (4) A Life Less Punishing by Matt Heath (A&U)
Broadcaster, writer and musician Matt Heath’s self-help guide, subtitled “13 ways to love the live you’ve got”, begins with the 1980s TV show The Greatest American Hero, about a hapless teacher, Ralph Hinkley, who can’t control the superhero suit he’s been given because he’s lost the manual, and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. If you don’t see the connection, it happens in an epiphany for Heath, feeling sorry for himself on the shore of a South Island lake. “I will consume the writings, lectures and podcast appearances of great thinkers and regurgitate them into a personal Hinkley manual.” It’ll be a self-help book in its purest form, he says, written to help himself in times of trouble, dealing with, in his chatty, easy style, anger, fear, loneliness, stress, boredom, grief and so on.
4. (5) Where is Hairy Maclary? by Lynley Dodd (Picture Puffin)
Toddlers love lift-the-flaps books and this one, following the rhyming clues – is he having a scratch in the strawberry patch, or taking a bath at the side of the path? – in search of Hairy and his canine chums, will be a wear-it-out favourite.
5. (3) Waitohu by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin)
Holding its spot is this new guided life journal based on the Māori lunar calendar from the best-selling psychiatrist author of Aroha and Wawata. “This writing journey is fuelled by the whakataukī (proverb) ‘ka mua, ka muri’, ‘walking backwards into the future’. Every month we circle back to the beginning of the book, rediscovering thoughts from the month before under the illuminating gaze of each moon face. New layers of ideas are added to earlier reflections, then collected together in a way that uncovers new truths.”
6. (6) The Final Diagnosis by Cynric Temple-Camp (HarperCollins)
Kiwi forensic and coronial pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp is back with his third book of death, disease and murder. As well as tales of everyday mortal weirdness, he weighs in on the New Year’s Eve disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, the murder trial of Mark Lundy, and the ill-fated Ansett Flight 703, which crashed in the Tararua Range in 1995. You can read an interview with Temple-Camp here.
7. (NEW) The Survivors by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)
Journalist Steve Braunias’s third collection of true-crime tales, “12 mysteries of human nature – unusual stories of how people choose to survive their own lives, and their decisions, desires, impulses ... and failings”. The author notes that crime hadn’t been a subject he thought about or consumed that much: “The best in the business … work hard and concentrate even harder to distil the essence of the day’s events at a trial, with an instinct for news and a total commitment to accuracy. I was among the worst in the business at that kind of thing but was immediately attracted to the background music of every trial – high comedy, low awfulness, the songs of death.”
8. (10) Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin)
The wisdom of 52 Māori proverbs explained by psychiatrist Hinemoa Elder in this bestselling book first released in 2020. An extract:
“Ko te mauri, he mea huna ki te moana – The life force is hidden in the sea.
“Powerful aspects of life are hidden in plain sight.
“This whakataukī stems from one of our famous ancestors from the north, Nukutawhiti. He cast his kura, his feathered cloak, into the Hokianga Harbour to calm the waters for safe passage. And this treasure remains there, out of sight, yet signifies the ancient presence of those that have gone before.
“This saying has given me strength so many times. I have always found it comforting because it speaks to the hidden magic of life.
“It reminds me of those things we feel intuitively but often ignore – we can choose to tune in to our gut instinct, for example, or wait until the messages become clearer and more obvious.
And it reminds me that we all have hidden powers inside us that we can too easily forget.”
9. (7) All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press)
In her first adult novel, Kino, the award-winning writer of the YA novel The Pōrangi Boy, casts a youthful eye over the fraught business of being a Māori activist in contemporary Aotearoa. Māreikura is full of good intentions, though. As the Listener review notes, she tends to see things, “in black and white and as absolutes – because she’s young, because she’s human, because she’s learning”. The author manages to mostly keep the didactic voice of the novel contained within her characters, though it does sometime spill out over the edges of this frame. “But satire when it’s this close to the bone isn’t the easiest thing to pull off. Fortunately, Kino provides a nice balance to Māreikura’s relentlessness, with a cast of utterly delightful, authentic and well-written secondary characters whose take on things te ao Māori is less vehement … The writing is consistently tight and a joy to read as it rattles along at pace with frequent laugh-out-loud moments, mainly in my instance at the intense self-involvement of the various young characters.” To read the Listener review, go here.
10. (9) At The Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin)
The Dunedin novelist’s latest tracks the journey of Libby and Curtis, married for 25 years, who go on a much-needed journey to the hotel of the title on the West Coast. There they encounter a collection of guests and staff, including James, who has been searching for the elusive South Island kōkako. Curtis needs to briefly go back to Wānaka but can’t return after a storm closes the road. Alone at the hotel, Libby is consumed by her recent brutal brush with cancer, a sizeable tumour having been removed from her left leg. James and Libby form an unlikely pair, finding themselves on an unexpected quest. Never maudlin or sentimental, At The Grand Glacier Hotel is a thoughtful, slow-moving, hopeful exploration of what it is to face one’s own mortality. To read the review, go here.
(Source: Nielsen Bookscan NZ – week ending July 20.)
