BooksDecember 14, 2016

Best books of 2016: the 20 best books of non-fiction

Staff writers

You’ve seen all the other best-of books lists and as the saying goes: they’re shit! Yeah nah this is the only one you need, as the Spinoff’s team of democratic experts bring together memoir, history, survivor’s stories, boxing, shops and other subjects from real life.

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved & Died in The 1940s (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $40) by Anne Sebba

The Spinoff’s choice not just as best book of non-fiction of 2016 but as the best book of any kind. “Courage is a lovely concept but especially attractive when it’s an idea as opposed to a necessary reality. Anne Sebba’s fabulous book, Les Parisiennes, sets out to show in a remarkably non-judgmental way, how the women of Paris acted when faced with German occupation in WW2, and perhaps even more interestingly, how they behaved in the years immediately following,” wrote Linda Burgess.

Double-Edged Sword (Mary Egan, $38) by Simonne Butler with Andra Jenkin

A survivor’s story – Butler was one of the two women P-freak asshole Tony Dixon went at with his Samurai sword on a summer’s day in 2003 – but also a portrait of authentic Westie life. It’s full of great sentences, it’s darkly funny in places, and it revisits the central terror in fine, astonishing detail: “I caught my hand as it fell through the air and I calmly tried to stick it back on.”

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile, $28) by Mary Beard

There were two stonking popular histories published this year, both of empires made epic by lust and greed and philosophical madness; SPQR was the less monstrous, but more exotic. An easy, thrilling read.

The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $50) by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The other stonking popular history of the year, and far more monstrous than SPQR. Montefiore chronicles depravity and monstrousness to an extent that will have your eyes hanging out of their sockets while achieving the difficult simultaneous feat of being glued to the page. Gruesome, bro.

My Father’s Island: A Memoir (Victoria University Press, $35) by Adam Dudding

Memoir of the year. Widely admired and awarded as one of New Zealand’s best long-form journalists, Dudding goes way, way further with this voyage around his father Robin, an depressive, literary eccentric getting up to all sorts of mayhem and disorder in Torbay on Auckland’s North Shore.

The Māori Meeting House: Introducing the whare whakairo (Te Papa Press, $49.99) by Damian Skinner

Sumptuous and sensitive illustrated art history of the marae in New Zealand life. “Great writing, great feel, and impeccable aesthetics…At $49.99 it’s a bargain or possibly even a steal because of all the taonga inside,” wrote Talia Marshall.

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate, $40) by Olivia Laing

Very nearly the Spinoff’s choice as best book of non-fiction of 2016. Laing is a singular writer, who thinks her way in and out of that most terrifying state of being in urban life: loneliness.

Mansfield & Me: A Graphic Memoir (Victoria University Press, $35) by Sarah Laing

No other book like it, really, is there? It’s a memoir told in colourful drawings, and the story intersects with insights into the life and times of Katherine Mansfield. All up: a work of art.

Can You Tolerate This? (Victoria University Press, $30) by Ashleigh Young

Genius at work. New Zealand’s best prose writer gathers her thoughts in an intimate, personal, thoughtful, socially engaged collection of essays.

1971: Never A Dull Moment (Bantam Press, $70) by David Hepworth

The premise is simple and audacious: 1971 was the greatest year in music, ever. Hepworth goes about his argument with brilliant chapters on Bowie, Sly Stone, Carole King, T Rex, Led Zep, Yes, Nick Drake and many other artists who created masterpieces in that shimmering year.

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Things That Matter: Stories of Life & Death from an Intensive Care Specialist (Allen & Unwin, $37) by David Galler

The Spinoff’s choice as best New Zealand book of the year – it’s scandalous that this massively popular and affecting book failed to make the longlist of the 2017 Ockham national book awards. Dr Galler takes an up close and personal look at the real-life medical dramas in intensive care.

The Shops (Luncheon Sausage Books, $40) by Steve Braunias and Peter Black

But it’s written by and published by the editor of the Spinoff Review of Books! Has he chosen his own book in this elite list? You bet! His collaboration with photographer Peter to create a quiet, lyrical celebration of New Zealand shops in small towns is awesome. Do the math: 44 colour photographs and 6000 words = a perfect Xmas gift.

Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (HarperSport, $34.99) by Thomas Hauser

The meaning of Muhammad Ali by his great biographer.

Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953 (Auckland University Press, $70) by Peter Simpson

Art book of the year. It’s the one Simpson was meant to write; his various investigations into the Christchurch art scene have led to this fascinating history of 20 years of frenetic artistic activity, aided and abetted by the likes of Curnow and Glover. Beautifully illustrated, beautifully art directed.

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In Love with These Times: My Life with Flying Nun Records (HarperCollins, $37) by Roger Shepherd

You bought the records, now buy the book. Artful memoir by the quiet architect of Flying Nun. All the bands are there, all the seething unruly punks – Carter, Knox, etc – and Shepherd lays himself bare.

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Schwartz, $26) by Vivian Gornick

This sly old New York broad was the absolute star of the 2016 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. She was candid about everything, including anal sex; her book lays it all out.

Women of the Catlins: Life In The Deep South (Otago University Press, $49.95) by Diana Noonan and Cris Antona

Striking black and white photographs, and stories of women in the Otago region of the Catlins. Roy Colbert wrote, “It has the appeal of Country Calendar, an endless stream of exceptional smiling New Zealanders making miraculous stuff from a sow’s ear…. There are so many glorious quintessential one-liners in this book. They should pick 52 and turn them into a souvenir pack of playing cards at the museum shop. I counted at least seven that were cardable in the opening chapter, and you would be hard put to find a better one-liner in non-fiction anywhere than Judy Walker on page 59 – ‘I don’t let being the wool ganger go to my head.’”

Roughy: Fishing the Mid-Ocean Ridges (Bach Books, $24.95) by AJ Peach

The best fishing book of the year. Peach tells it like it is, in this fresh, amusing account of his life and times as an ancient mariner, with a stand-out chapter about working on a Ukrainian rustbucket.

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Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means (Bloomsbury, $49.99) by Brendan King

“This is the first full-length biography of Beryl Bainbridge, the brilliant Liverpudlian novelist…..So many men! It’s not the morality concerns me, it’s the strain on the memory. Harry, Hugh, Paul, Ken, Adam, George, Mick, Les, Alan, Harold, Mike, Don, Ronnie, and all. If this were a soap – and at one point Beryl had a part in Coronation Street, playing a left-wing friend of Ken Barlow’s – no storyliner would ever come up with such repetitious script. Beryl falls in love, Beryl cries, then Beryl spots the perfect man and we’re back to: ‘this is the one’”, wrote Marion McLeod.

Through the Eyes of a Miner: The Photography of Joseph Divis (Friends of Waiuta/Craig Potton Books, $40) by Simon Nathan

Strange, haunting photographs of a small West Coast mining settlement – Waiuta – before the mine closed and it became, virtually overnight, a ghost town.

Keep going!

BooksDecember 13, 2016

The Spinoff Review of Books presents the 20 best fiction books of 2016

The Spinoff

Staff writers

You’ve seen all the other best-of books lists and as the saying goes: they’re shit! Yeah nah this is the only one you need, as the Spinoff’s team of democratic experts bring together literary fiction, New Zealand stuff, and total fucking awesomely readable junk.

Commonwealth (Bloomsbury, $33) by Ann Patchett

The Spinoff’s choice as the best novel of 2016. “It creeps up on you, this novel. It opens in 1964, at a christening party in suburban Los Angeles. Bert Cousins shows up uninvited with a big bottle of gin. The backyard is full of citrus trees groaning with oranges – the mixer. Everyone gets rather loose, and Bert unwisely kisses the hostess…”, wrote Holly Walker.

The Sellout (Oneworld, $28) by Paul Beatty

Satire, kind of; funny, definitely. Winner of the 2016 Man Booker prize, and the subject of a tormented, wonderful review by Charlotte Graham.

Night School (Random House $38) by Lee Child

The 21^st Reacher, and a kind of prequel. It’s 1996, and he’s still in the army. In the morning they give him a medal, and in the afternoon they send him back to school. That night he’s off the grid. As per, fucken A.

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All Day at the Movies (Vintage, $38) by Fiona Kidman

The Spinoff’s choice as best New Zealand novel of the year. Our most confident storyteller and our most observant writer of character sets out a family epic that begins in 1952, in Motueka, where a young war widow finds work picking tobacco…the years pass, generations follow, New Zealand flows past the window. Magisterial.

The Girls (Chatto & Windus, $37) by Emma Cline

Much-hyped and much-admired novel based on the crazy girls of the Manson Family. “A fine book, a spell, a dreamy conjuring of that summer of ’69. A companion-piece to Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides,” wrote Sarah Laing.

deleted scenes for lovers (Victoria University Press, $30) by Tracey Slaughter

Longlisted for the 2017 Ockham national book award. “These stories are note-perfect, plentiful, and pack an emotional punch that reverberates for days. If there’s a theme, it’s trauma, and the honest but often harmful ways ordinary people respond to it. In Slaughter’s New Zealand – which is really just New Zealand – there’s no shortage of trauma,” wrote Holly Walker.

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Mount! (Bantam, $38) by Jilly Cooper

“No other writer could get away with a cast of characters that runs to 11 pages, including: ‘BETHANY LATTON: a beautiful bitchy nymphomaniac; HEREWARD MACBETH: a baby, known as Hereward the Awake, and MR WANG: a corrupt Chinese mafia warlord who is cruelly colonising Africa. Also a sexual predator known as ‘The Great Willy of China’. There is also a cast of animals that runs to six pages”: The Guardian.

The Sympathizer (Corsair, $28) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Very nearly the Spinoff’s choice as novel of the year. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Nguyen’s novel remained in the best-seller chart at both Unity stories for much of the year; readers obviously responded to the story told by a Communist double agent, a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the fall of Saigon, and builds a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in LA.

All the Light We Cannot See (HarperCollins, $24.99) by Anthony Doerr

“This novel will be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or beach holiday ahead. It is such a page-turner, entirely absorbing: one of those books in which the talent of the storyteller…defies one’s better judgment:” The Guardian, almost reluctantly admitting that one of the most popular novels of the year, set in World War II, about a little blind French girl and a clever German boy, is such a pleasure to read.

Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (Victoria University Press, $30) by Danyl McLauchlan

A bumper year for funny New Zealand novels. The noirish, farcical sequel to the noirish, silly Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley, tells a tale of cryptic maps and ancient evils and, you know, mysterious mysteries. “Why is a bath full of ashes? Why are pale people buying up an entire book stall? Who is the comely treasurer carrying a golf club?…Entertaining”: David Hill, NZ Herald.

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A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (Lawrence and Gibson, $23) by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Told you it was a bumper year for New Zealand novels! Publisher’s blurbology: “Rachel McManus has just started at the New Zealand Alarm and Response Ministry. One of the few females working there, she is forced to traverse the peculiarities of Wellington bureaucracy, lascivious colleagues, and decades of sedimented hierarchy. She has the chance to prove herself by investigating a suspected terrorist, who they fear is radicalising impressionable youth and may carry out an attack himself on the nation’s capital.” Longlisted for the 2017 Ockham national book award.

Dear Mr M (Text, $36.99) by Herman Koch

“Mr M’s downstairs neighbour is listening when he takes a shower. He’s imagining the scene at his dinner table and the look on M’s wrinkled face when he makes love to his much younger wife. He’s following him to book signings, inspecting his mail and pursuing his wife when she goes out of town…So begins Dutch writer Herman Koch’s Dear Mr M, full of suspense and intense creepiness,” wrote Wyoming Paul.

The Vegetarian: A Novel (Portobello, $23) by Han Kang

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker prize for International Fiction. “After a violent and disturbing nightmare, an ordinary Korean woman decides to stop eating meat. She empties the kitchen of fish, eggs, pork, and for the first time ignores the commands of her husband. Her behaviour becomes increasingly extreme and harmful to her own health, spiralling into mental illness…This is a book about the rejection of life, of society, of the self ,” wrote Wyoming Paul.

My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking, $26) by Elizabeth Strout

Fact: this book featured on more best-books of the year lists in the quality press in Britain and the US than any other novel. “A heart-wrenching depiction of a clumsy, yearning, mother/daughter relationship…If you want someone who understands relationships, love, aloneness, dread, humanity, and truth, and who has the lightest touch in the world of literature, then read her,” wrote Linda Burgess.

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Magic (Delacorte Press, $28.95) by Danielle Steel

There’s Jean-Philippe and Valerie Dumas, who are devoted to each other and their young children. He’s a rising star in the financial world, she’s an editor at French Vogue. And there’s the epitome of a stylish power couple from Milan, Benedetta and Gregorio Mariani, who run a venerable Italian clothing empire. Gregorio projects strength, but has a weakness that will ignite a crisis in their company and their marriage. Also there’s Chantal Giverny, an award-winning screenwriter, and Dharam Singh, one of India’s most successful tech entrepreneurs. Couples, sex, travel, wealth: her number one New York Times best-seller is a return to form.

Trust No One (Upstart Press, $34.99) by Paul Cleave

Latest sizzling crime novel by the New Zealand boss of the craft. A crime writer claims his books are real – that he committed the murders he wrote about. No one believes him. Is he telling the truth?

Red Herring (HarperCollins, $30) by Jonothan Cullinane

When Dad’s finished his Lee Child, this’ll make a perfect next book – a thriller set in Auckland in 1951. It’s fast, it’s detailed, it’s a damned good read. Publisher’s blurbology: “A man overboard, a murder and a lot of loose ends…Into the secret world of rival union politics, dark political agendas and worldwide anti-communist hysteria steps Johnny Molloy, a private detective with secrets of his own.”

Eileen (Vintage, $26) by Ottessa Moshfegh

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. US novel about a lonely woman who lives in a drab New England town and works in a correction facility for boys. “She lusts for the most handsome of the prison guards. She touches herself and smells her finger and catalogues her body’s flaws…Unsettling”: The Guardian.

The Name on the Door is Not Mine: Stories new and selected (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) by CK Stead

The master gathers up new and old stories in one seamless collection. There’s a lot of sex in it, a lot of playfulness, a lot of really good writing in the Spinoff’s choice as second best book of short stories of 2016.

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American Housewife (Doubleday, $43) by Helen Ellis

The Spinoff’s choice as best book of short stories of 2016. “The razor-sharp stories in Ellis’ first collection send up wealthy housewives, the literary world, and reality television. A sinister book club recruits a new member. Neighbours in an upscale apartment block go to war over how to remodel their common hallway. An ex-competitor rescues child beauty queens and re-homes them with barren society wives. In the best and longest story, ‘Dumpster Diving with the Stars’, a blocked writer competes in a mad reality series with a couple of scientologist A-listers and a frightened Playboy bunny,” wrote Holly Walker.