Latest FromBook Reviews
Book review: The Secret War, Max Hastings
This is Hastings' first sortie into the secret world as he puts the codebreakers' achievements in context by measuring them against competing sources of secret intelligence.
Book review: From The Cutting Room Of Barney Kettle, Kate De Goldi
This is a cross-over novel of "stories within stories within stories". We're told at the start it's written by a supine, seriously-injured survivor of some major disaster.
Books: Recent releases October 4
Margaret Atwood takes a playful look at human failings.
'Everything lands me in trouble' - Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie has written his funniest novel in years - but beneath the jokes lies an uncomfortable truth, discovers Gaby Wood.
Book review: Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie
The tone of Salman Rushdie's latest novel is like a chocolate with a nut centre, beguilingly sweet on the outside but with a hard core.
Book review: Trifecta, Ian Wedde
The typically demotic title introduces three world-soiled siblings, children of a dangerously attractive and totally untrustworthy refugee from Nazism who's credited with making New Zealand aware of real coffee and really modern buildings.
Book review: Wild Roads - A New Zealand Journey, Bruce Ansley
Author Bruce Ansley cherishes pointing his car along New Zealand's highways and roads.
Book review: The Fish Ladder, Katharine Norbury
Fish ladders are structures that Britons began building in the 19th century when they started damming and blocking waterways.
Book review: The Whispering Swarm, Michael Moorcock
There are too many Michael Moorcocks. I don't mean the books - although there are a bewildering number of those, there could never be too many for his admirers.
Book review: James Cook's Lost World, Graeme Lay
In this final volume of Graeme Lay's fictional trilogy on the life of James Cook, we confront a very different man to the legend or, for that matter, the first two books in the series.
Book review: Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Like every other book of Stephenson's, this one uses formal language to position itself a small, strategic distance from its readers, like a speaker standing behind a lectern.
Book review: The Pale North, Hamish Clayton
It begins near the end of the 20th century. The Big One has finally hit; on a strangely warm July afternoon, the Wellington Fault tears asunder, and New Zealand's capital is wrecked.
Book review: Love + Hate, Hanif Kureishi
A grinding, persuasive power binds this collection of short fiction and essays, many of which have been published elsewhere in the past two or three years.
Book review: Skyfaring - A Journey with a Pilot
In an age of low-cost carriers, DVT and crappy movies on crappy little screens, we often lose sight of the old-fashioned wonder of flight, writes Winston Aldworth.