When author Johnny Wray was a lad at school in the 1920s, his form master was most disparaging of his writing, describing it as: “Conglomerations of facts occasioned by heterogeneous concatenations of stupid irrelevancies.”
In keeping with the almost impermeable wall that prevents a healthy transtasman book trade, Helen Garner is relatively unknown in New Zealand.
I'd love to meet John Crace. The Guardian columnist is acerbic, focused, appallingly funny.
This is a very strange book. It's about Neil Gaiman, so it can probably afford to be.
Gerard Woodward’s family gave him plenty of material to write about, but it took years to work out how, he tells Linda Herrick.
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is a narrative of disintegration and self-destruction, written in the most lyrical of language.
The $100 million movie of Cloud Atlas bombed, but that didn’t halt the rising star of its author, David Mitchell, regarded by many as the greatest of his generation. now he is tweeting his latest work, writes Hermione Hoby.
The many facets of England meet in the pages of Graham Swift’s new book, writes Stephen Jewell.
Martine Bailey puts a dark twist on food in her ‘culinary gothic’ novel that features real, historic family recipes, writes Stephen Jewell.
Reconsidering moments that changed everything is an old chestnut in fiction, but Linda Grant manages it with verve in this excellent novel.
Fred Robbins is an enigma, even to the person closest to him in the world, his sister Ava.
Tina Shaw talks to Rebecca Barry Hill about her connection to provincial New Zealand and why she is drawn to dark crime.
It’s full of dazzling prose, it’s ingeniously put together, it’s so long it’s a drag to lug around.
In his second novel, Craig Sherborne presents a family of transients, “last of their kind”, who drift along, squatting in abandoned properties dotted across Victoria’s wheat belt.
Breton Dukes has an interesting bio. He has shifted from north to south — from Whangarei to Dunedin.
Publishers are wary of short stories. They don’t sell as easily or pleasingly as novels.
It starts in the 1970s. An illiterate girl from a Soweto slum is crammed into a truck with a load of potatoes.