Chloe Blades

Guest writer

Chloe Blades is a bookseller at Unity Books in Auckland and blogger at www.kloekloe.com. She migrated to New Zealand in 2014 after graduating from Loughborough University in English Literature. Chloe was born in Norwich in 1990.

Jared Savage’s Gangsters Paradise (Image: Tina Tiller)

‘I don’t write these stories to scare people’: Jared Savage talks Gangster’s Paradise

The new book from the author of Gangland explores how and why gang culture in New Zealand has evolved and escalated in recent years.

By Chloe Blades | 14th November, 2023

Illustrations by Gregory O’Brien elevate the memoir (Image: Supplied)

Towards Compostela is a book that will walk with you

Chloe Blades reviews a travel memoir about a pilgrimage, and invites us to share in her own.

By Chloe Blades | 10th May, 2021

A funeral for a Head Hunters associate who was shot dead in February 2020 (Photo: Alan Gibson / New Zealand Herald)

Gangland: a book about meth and the people whose lives it touches

A senior journalist tells the story of how meth arrived - and flourished - in Aotearoa.

By Chloe Blades | 17th February, 2021

(Photo: iStock via Getty)

Seriously, you need to order your Christmas books right now

This festive season we've got some extra-fun shipping logjams to deal with.

By Chloe Blades | 13th October, 2020

Review: The Truants, a novel of debauchery and dangerous charisma

Review: The Truants, a novel of debauchery and dangerous charisma

Chloe Blades reviews Kate Weinberg's first novel, which is selling like mad and earning the London writer comparisons to Agatha Christie and Donna Tartt.

By Chloe Blades | 19th September, 2019

Review: The Porpoise would win a fight against Jordan Peterson’s lobster-men

Review: The Porpoise would win a fight against Jordan Peterson’s lobster-men

Chloe Blades on the raw, complex and unabashedly feminist new novel by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

By Chloe Blades | 13th May, 2019

Bridget Jones goes to the White House: a racy new political memoir

Bridget Jones goes to the White House: a racy new political memoir

Chloe Blades finds joy in a memoir of the Obama Presidency by a millennial stenographer, who is instructed to 'exude femininity in a strictly non-sexual way'.

By Chloe Blades | 11th July, 2018