1. The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin)
This June, it will be 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 WW 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 Special Operations Executives 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. Read the review here.
2. Foraging New Zealand by Peter Langlands (Penguin)
Kiwis clearly love the idea of foraging our forests and fields and riverbanks for edible wild plants, and in current times there’s probably an economic element as well. Liv Sisson’s Fungi of Aotearoa sold pallet-loads when it came out last year, and we can expect Peter Langlands’ book, from the same publisher, to do the same. Langlands is perhaps the country’s only professional forager, collecting wild flora for restaurants and running workshops. It’s a chunky guide, 500 pages, that picks out 250 plants and fungi from about 7500 edible species. The book warns of stuff not to touch, and plants that look like others but are verboten. The range is impressive. You may know you can eat samphire and wild chervil, but be surprised that you can scarf parts of rengarenga, pōhutukawa stamens, wandering willie. You can read an interview with Peter Langlands here.
3. Evolving by Judy Bailey (HarperCollins)
In which the person who presented our TV news from 1986 to 2005 (“I just fell into it”) offers an “inspiring and personal guide to ageing well and with happiness”. It covers older health, fitness (she does Pilates), finances and embracing joy, as well as the inevitable losses and griefs of a life. Bailey says being in your 70s today is a world away from what it used to be. “We’re out there doing things and we’ve got a lot to contribute,” she told the Australian Women’s Weekly NZ.
4. Feijoa by Kate Evans (Moa Press)
A new guide to and history (with recipes) of our second-favourite oval fruit.
David Hill in the Listener said: “Feijoas: there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground with them. You either breathe in their sun-and-summer scent as you anticipate that first honey-lush slide of them over the papillae (indeed, I’m salivating), or you recoil from contact, going ‘Ewww! Too perfumed! Too sickly!’ … Foreign? Well, yes: they originated some 30 million years ago, in Brazilian highlands and Uruguayan valleys. There’s something pleasingly incongruous about a plant with such provenance becoming commonplace in Kiwi side streets.
“Raglan-based, internationally published journalist Kate Evans offers this as ‘a book about connections’. So it is: connections with other feijoa fanatics (Evans neatly calls them ‘disciples’); between plants and the animals who spread their seeds; between ‘tamed’ varieties and environments; and, of course, between humans and nature. No plant is an island.
“Evans is an irrepressible investigator, phoning or visiting experts across multiple continents. From its origins in South America, the feijoa was studied in Germany, collected in France, domesticated in the US, transplanted to NZ. She heads to virtually all venues.” You can read more from Kate Evans about feijoas here.
5. Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins)
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku is a respected Māori scholar, an expert on tā moko, and now an emeritus professor. But in 1981, she was the first Māori woman to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. To achieve her success, she had to fight against family pressure, peer contempt, the academic and Māori establishment, racism, sexism and homophobia. And she would take up political fights, leading protests for the Vietnam War, the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa, Waitangi Day, women’s liberation.
Her childhood, centred around “the pā”, Ōhinemutu, on the western shore of Lake Rotorua, is richly evoked in this memoir. “This was a place of drifting thermal mists and streams of trout and crayfish; her family had its own bathhouse, mostly open to the sky and sandy below.” But if anyone still imagines New Zealand in the 50s and 60s as a wholesome pastoral idyll, Hine Toa will dispel those illusions. “Ngāhuia’s parents separated, but to attend her local school she had to live with her abusive father. He beat her and perhaps more.”
The memoir is ultimately a contradiction, “honest but often frustratingly oblique; explicit in some places and coy in others … And yet this is an important book: vital to write, vital to publish and vital to read.” Read the review here.
6. Brown Bird by Jane Arthur (Penguin)
“The morning I met Chester was hot and still, one of those very-summer-holidays kinds of mornings when you wake up early and see the day spread out ahead of you like a vast, glinting sea, if the sea was something calm and full of sensible options for passing the time, rather than a dark, deep pit of unknown danger.”
So Wellington author and poet Jane Arthur sets that scene in her first book for children. It features 11-year-old Rebecca, who “tries to make herself invisible so people won’t call her weird”, notes the publisher. Resigned to spending the holidays by herself in a new neighbourhood while her mum works, she meets Chester, who has come to stay for the summer. “He is loud and fun and full of ideas. But will Rebecca be able to cope with being taken so far from her quiet comfort zone? Rebecca is about to find out that she can be braver than she ever thought possible.”
7. The Team That Hit the Rocks by Peter Jerram (David Bateman)
In April 1968, the interisland passenger ferry Wahine hit Barrett Reef at the entrance to Wellington Harbour in a cyclone, the worst storm recorded in New Zealand’s history. Among the 610 passengers and 125 crew was the Lincoln College cricket team, with one Peter Jerram among its number. Some 53 people lost their lives and while the cricket team all survived, the disaster had a huge impact on them.
Initially, they didn’t discuss their experiences, but over the years that has changed. Drawing on the written and oral testimony of his teammates, crew and rescuers, Jerram tells their stories, and examines what led to the disaster and loss of life, finding serious fault with the Court of Inquiry into the tragedy.
The Listener said that there have, of course, been other books and documentaries about the catastrophe but few, if any, that have captured the catharsis of the event so directly and with undemonstrative emotion. “These are remarkable stories; enduring but unvarnished personal accounts of what it means to confront death … [it’s] an intensely felt exploration of tragedy and survival.”
8. Take Two by Danielle Hawkins (A&U)
Laura is a successful communications manager on a break from work and back in her home town for a visit before walking from one end of New Zealand to the other. But her plans get thrown out the window when the family of her long-term ex-boyfriend, Doug, come back into her life. Then Doug’s kid brother, Mick, begins to take an interest.
From the Listener’s review: “Take Two is a great small-town drama in which local gossips try to make mischief with Laura’s situation, while the family bookshop needs to be kept running and a murky property development is being sold to vulnerable locals. It’s a cosy read, though the author isn’t afraid to broach some bigger issues such as how families manage illness, women deal with infertility and the sometimes tricky relationships between mothers and daughters.”
9. 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.”
10. Māori Made Easy Pocket Guide by Scotty Morrison (Penguin)
Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy Pocket Guide does exactly what it says on the kēna, or tin. A bit wider than a cellphone, it’s an updated and reworked “careful selection of some of the best and most useful content from my previous books”. This includes pronunciation and communication basics, as well as history, tikanga and essential phrases like “Aue, kei te tino rongo au i te whiu a te waipiro” – “Gosh, I am terribly hungover.”
(Source: Nielsen Bookscan NZ – week ending May 4.)
