BooksDecember 17, 2019

Decade in review: 10 defining New Zealand books of the 2010s

Contributing writer

The loss of innocence, the revitalisation of te reo, the rising up of women and of LGBTQ rights – the decade has been a ride. Here are our pick of the books Aotearoa wrote along the way.

All Blacks Don’t Cry by John Kirwan, 2010

The book that launched JK’s second career: mental health campaigner and catalyst to hard, important conversations all over Godzone. Think how much better we are at talking about mental health now! A large part of that, I reckon, is down to JK.

I remember reading an advance copy in the newsroom of the Sunday Star-Times, yelping at my colleagues every so often. “You guys John Kirwan is freaking out so much he’s thinking about killing people!” “You guys now John Kirwan is thinking about killing himself!” I was a twerp.

Halfway through reading I got a call; my grandpa was in hospital. Heart attack. I packed the book – Grandpa enjoyed books, and rugby, and he was reading way too much Ian Wishart – and flew to Napier. Grandpa didn’t recover enough for any reading. I still wish that he had read this book, and that we could’ve talked about it: about depression and anxiety and self-care and communication, and how those things play out in our family, and how immensely brave it was of Kirwan to boot his vulnerabilities into public view. / Catherine Woulfe

Free Range in the City by Annabel Langbein, 2011

WTH is Annabel “hop in your jetboat to forage for raspberries” Langbein doing on this rarefied list? Free Range in the City deserves the slot because it was a mega-seller, because Langbein continues to dominate the local cookbook scene, and because the whole free range thing neatly sums up the blessed naivety of the first part of the decade.

Ten years ago, what the people who buy cookbooks cared about was growing rocket on their balconies and bunging it into scones. That was what we called “sustainable”. And it felt really good!

The cover features Langbein in a turquoise shirt, sleeves rolled up like she’s just itching to shell a washing basket full of broad beans. (This was a development on her 2010 monster The Free Range Cook, where she wears a turquoise cardigan and looks slightly baffled, a look she has not worn since).

Now, Free Range in the City has taken on a sort of second life: all those family picnics at the beach, those long weekend lunches, function as a recipe for how to get on with things regardless. / CW

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, 2013

Winner of the Man Booker Prize and about to become a BBC 2 miniseries, Catton’s second novel is famously long and complex: it’ll either do your head in or light you up, but it’s a sitter for this list, the first book we decided on. The story is set on the West Coast in 1866. There is a goldrush. There is a murder. Catton organises the characters and chapters according to the signs of the Zodiac, planets, etcetera; on top of that the length of each chapter changes to represent the lunar cycle. Ye gods. / CW

Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History by Aroha Harris, Judith Binney and Atholl Anderson, 2014

In 2016 a panel of experts assembled by the Spinoff picked this as the greatest work of non-fiction by or about Māori ever. They said of it:

Like a supergroup of historian rock stars producing the best album of all time. Far from succumbing to triumphalist history, Tangata Whenua meets Māori history on its own terms and rejects some of the comfortable assumptions of a flawless pre-colonial society. That’s valuable, but the book’s lasting legacy is how it expands the scope of Māori history, weaving together knowledge from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, law, political science and of course oral history. This is theory at its finest, it resists treating its subject in isolation, instead searching for connections to make sense of the world as we find it.

Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager, 2014

Oh, the blessed naivety of 2014.

Māori Made Easy: For Everyday Learners of the Māori Language by Scotty Morrison, 2015

Despite the upswing of interest in learning te reo Māori this decade, there are very few learning resources available, and fewer still from recent years. Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy series doesn’t just fill a gap in the market though – his 30 minutes a day for 30 weeks programme is elegantly simple and understands that learning te reo Māori for some people is an unlearning of trauma too.

It’s a bestseller that has changed the language learning landscape in classrooms and outside of them for all New Zealanders. Like a modern day AW Reed, Morrison’s books will become a staple of every New Zealand bookshelf in years to come. / Leonie Hayden

The Chimes by Anna Smaill, 2015

In 2013 New Zealand finally passed legislation allowing same-sex couples to marry. Two years later Anna Smaill released this novel in which the young protagonist is gay, but that’s by the by – the important thing is that he’s in love.

The Chimes is weird and gentle-but-horrifying and quite gobsmacking, and it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2016. Summarising the plot makes it sound entirely batty. We’re in London. The populace is controlled by an enormous musical instrument, the Carillon, which sounds every evening and in doing so wipes clear all memories of the day. (The Guardian called it “a kind of omnipresent tinnitus”). We follow a gang of young outlaws on a river journey.

Smaill gives her world gravitas and layers – networks of tunnels, actually – and she is so confident in its peculiarity that after a few pages you stop questioning and go with the music. / CW

Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young, 2016

A book of essays. The New Zealand book of essays. The New York Times gave their review a hilariously New York Times-y headline: ‘In Essays About Bodily Ailments and Other Conditions, Clues to Writing – And Life’. I mean it does the job, but also, lol. In the review they said things like “a lovely, strange and profound debut” and “an essay collection unlike any I’ve read”.

If you could pin the boom in local creative nonfiction to a single book you’d pin it to this one. And it’s undoubtedly the book that Young has to thank for the sweet sweet Windham-Campbell Prize that was sprung on her the following year, worth US$165,000. A few days after the win she told The Spinoff: “I’m not capable of processing in my head that amount of money. The most immediate thing I can think of is that I can buy a table and a chair for my living room so I can write by the window.”

Millenials! Honestly.

We had to smuggle her book onto this list because Young, now our poetry editor, would’ve deleted it immediately. / CW

Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird, 2016

Hera Lindsay Bird’s poem ‘Keats is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’ broke the internet, and then her eponymous collection seemed to break New Zealand poetry. A lot was made of its sexual content, but what was and still is really shocking about this book is its poetic brilliance – its wicked intelligence, hilarious litanies, and riotous beauty, and how all of these qualities were in full force when she was sending up poetry itself. As Steve Toussaint has pointed out in his essay ‘TMI’, Bird also magnificently trashed the old dictum that we should never assume that ‘the speaker’ of a poem is the poet themselves. ‘My name is Hera Lindsay Bird,’ she declares. ‘This book is called Hera Lindsay Bird / I wrote it, and I mean at least 75% of it’. It’s partly her direct experience that gives her poems their emotional weight – the peeing in a supermarket, the frustration with poetry (‘What’s the point of saying new things?’), being in and out of love (‘Love comes back / from where it’s never gone…It was here the whole time / like a genetic anomaly waiting to reveal itself’). Bird was criticised, feebly, for many of these poetic transgressions, which only made her work shine brighter. In the end, Hera Lindsay Bird is transgressive simply by being mind-bendingly good. / Ashleigh Young

The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 by Vincent O’Malley, 2016

The extent to which the New Zealand wars were predicated on deception and corruption had been obscured until Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand. He brings into sharp relief the brutal and unjustified attacks on Waikato iwi and the subsequent theft of land as punishment, and finally tells some of the untold tūpuna stories of the battles themselves, passed down from generation to grieving generation. It draws a clear line from colonial abuse of power to the problems we face as society today. Naming those events has already changed our thinking as country in immutable ways, sparking a campaign led by students to make New Zealand history a compulsory subject in schools.

As O’Malley concludes at the end of the chapter titled ‘Owning our history’: “None of this requires feelings of guilt or shame, but simply a willingness to hear, read and embrace the difficult aspects of our past. And buried within this tale of loss and waste, with all of its attendant grief and misery, we might even find some uplifting elements if we look closely enough.” / LH

Keep going!

BooksDecember 16, 2019

The 10 best New Zealand fiction books of 2019

The Spinoff Review of Books

⚖️

Presenting: the third installment in our best-of-the-year series, put together by the Spinoff and various benevolent elves. This time it’s fiction. These are the books that moved us, that we walk around with in our heads, and that we are giving for Christmas, smug with the certainty that they’re absolutely kick-ass.

The 10 best NZ children’s books of 2019

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, $35, review here)

Michelle Langstone writes:

Elizabeth Knox is an author whose mind moves so swiftly you can almost hear it crackle when you meet her in person. Her deep and innate intelligence and curiosity are so boldly and beautifully on display in The Absolute Book. So much has been written about it, there’s almost no point going on, except to say that there is no other New Zealand author who gets into my dreams the way Elizabeth does. When I read this book, I had several dreams about trees in one week, and I felt the gauze of other worlds brushing my skin regularly. She conjures things out of the air as if it were no trouble at all, that’s how good she is.

A Mistake by Carl Shuker (Victoria University Press, $30, review here)

We’re nicking this from Maggie Trapp’s review in the Washington Post, because all our helper elves took it as a given that someone else would be raving about A Mistake. “Oh, Shuker of course,” they’d say – then write about something else.

“In A Mistake, New Zealand author Carl Shuker conveys in gorgeous, heartbreaking detail the shock of catastrophe and the ways we try to make sense of disaster after the fact … The novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth Taylor, is, at 42, the youngest and only female consultant general surgeon at Wellington Hospital. She is also consumed by the long-ago story of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, the ‘most beautiful story of error’ she’s ever read … A Mistake asks us to view and review Elizabeth’s own missteps, which, seen from conflicting viewpoints, appear increasingly disastrous.”

Afakasi Woman by Lani Wendt Young (OneTree House, $29)

Catherine Woulfe writes:

Lani Wendt Young is shouting in this collection of short stories, shouting with joy sometimes, or laughter, but often with a hot righteous anger, and with the force of generations.

The collection was first published digitally in 2012, winning the University of South Pacific’s Fiction Prize. There are new stories in this version.

Among the many that have stuck with me: ‘Don’t Tell’, in which a young girl reports sexual abuse by a family member and is persecuted for it, and ‘We Love the Samoan People!’, a vignette of a hotel check-in counter: “Mata politely averts her eyes from the palagi who has so much #whiteMan confidence that he can wear a lavalava without the security of shorts underneath.”

The Father of Octopus Wrestling by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, $27.99)

Emma Neale writes:

Frankie has opened my eyes to how sinuous, flexible and varied flash fiction can be; and the interlinked sequences here become fascinating labyrinths of comedy, sideways inference, and pathos. Her understanding of how goddamn odd humans are is so refreshing, it’s like standing under a waterfall in your undies, hooting out loud at the cold, after a long hot tramp where you’ve had to be uncomplaining and polite with really boring people. Finally, you meet Frankie!!! I want to push this book forward because I don’t know if I would have discovered it without being asked to edit it by Canterbury University Press – and the way the media works, smaller forms, smaller presses, and quieter voices don’t always get heard with the depth and perception they deserve.

Auē by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press, $35, extract here)

Catherine Woulfe writes:

Shit I was tired when this book arrived. What I needed to do was sleep when bub slept, but what I did instead was mow through this exhilarating, beautiful, shock of a story. The author dedicates it to her cousin, Glen Bo Duggan, killed by his mother’s partner in 1994. He needed a taniwha to save him, Manawatu writes, “to come and rip through his front door and tear down the walls of the house so everyone could see what was going on behind them”.

We’ve been championing her book, her taniwha, since day one: it is about violence and toxic masculinity and gangs and brutality, but there’s more than one love story in there too, and a couple of ratbag kids you’ll get desperately attached to. The writing is wild, and sure, and wonderful.

The Gulf Between by Maxine Alterio (Penguin, $38)

Fiona Kidman writes:

Maxine Alterio’s The Gulf Between is a suspense novel set between New Zealand and Italy. Julia is a young, impulsive New Zealander when she meets and marries Benito Moretti in London. But what dark secrets does his family harbour and what is their connection to an unconscious man in a Queenstown hospital, many years later? The novel takes the reader through the twists and turns of Naples, relationships with nightmare relatives and secret deals. The colourful landscapes and lovely descriptions of Italian food add enticing layers to the unfolding drama. A blazer of an ending.

When it All Went to Custard by Danielle Hawkins (HarperCollins, $35)

Catherine Woulfe writes:

Huge Hawkins fangirl here. I think she’s one of our best writers, as well as happening to sell a hell of a lot of books.

I’ve loved her ever since her first novel, Chocolate Cake for Breakfast, in which a rural vet falls in love with an All Black – if I recall, the meet-cute was him actually falling over her, on the back steps of a backblocks pub.

I like that she potters about in the garden: her women are forever deadheading irises or mourning a hydrangea. And I like that when those women get hit with dramas she makes them deal with the practicalities – getting kids to bed, closing up the cafe, feeding the dogs – before letting them fall apart. I like that the parents always live just down the road so there’s lots of popping-in for cuppas. I like the blokes – the love interest in this one collects houseplants. I like her voice, most of all: she’s funny and wry and if she ever feels inclined toward a writerly flourish, she prunes it back hard.

Attraction by Ruby Porter (Text Publishing, $37)

Michalia Arathimos writes:

Porter sets up this compelling but almost inaccessible inner world for her main character, all the while being seemingly straightforward about things other writers find taboo: sexual encounters, food, painful family histories. Because of the straightforward descriptions of, say, a woman being fingered leaning against a counter top, the characters’ real depths seem more elusive. Attraction is like a series of tricks, with surfaces giving way to further surfaces, and the characters oddly as far away from themselves as we are from them. All the way through we have this exceptional unfolding of the main character grappling with her Pākehā-ness in the face of a violent colonial past, with te reo and Māori place names invoked almost as magic charms. This struggle to come to terms with a personally-felt guilt and placelessness makes this a really important read.

Sport 47 edited by Tayi Tibble, with Fergus Barrowman, Kirsten McDougall and Ashleigh Young (Victoria University Press, $30, extract here)

Becky Manawatu writes:

Sport 47 is where it’s at. The kōrero between Patricia Grace and Anahera Gildea is one that as I read it, I wished I’d read long ago, so long ago, but you’re at where you’re at, and where I’m at now is better off for Sport 47. Tēnā koutou! Want more. So much incredible work in there. A standout fave was Nicole Titihuia Hawkins’ poem ‘Type Cast’ – how good could Shorty Street actually be? Talia Marshall (genius), essa may ranapiri (deep), Rebecca Hawke (sold me another little collection in a pub and we got our photo with a sheep).

NB: we made a captain’s call and snuck it into the fiction list because non-fiction was chocka.

Pūrākau: Māori myths retold by Māori writers edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka (RHNZ Vintage, $38)

Becky Manawatu writes:

Pūrākau! Again, like a mean shindig with a bunch of crack up, forever young but wise and older-than-the-stars types! It’s like having all these incredible people together at a nice place (like our mean pad at Waimangaroa – which has a pool table btw). So much goodness between two covers. A pukapuka for the child in you. I got to hear some of the authors speak at the Verb Fest including Apirana Taylor, so now when I read him I can actually hear his beautiful – actually magic – voice. I don’t want to weird anyone out but my hubster said the same thing to me the other day, he was like, “If I want to, I can still actually hear his voice.” But don’t worry, even if you haven’t heard his voice, his contribution to Pūrākau is cool. As is Renée’s! Tina Makereti’s! Keri Hulme’s! Witi Ihimaera! OMG! I have a pool table! We should collect around it some time, please lol? (Not lol – serious af). However, when I need to reflect on something someone has said, I will demand silence. But other than that, it could be cool.

Editor’s note: if we were allowed to pick another, which we’re not, obviously, because we’re at 10, but just if we were, let it be known that it would be The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, $30) which is a textured, rich, thoughtful take on what might be left, later. Our review here.