Prompted by Peter Dann's link to his recording of Katherine Mansfield's 'Prelude' at Librivox*, I listened to the story this afternoon, hypnotised by Peter's rendering of this ostensibly simple story ...

This month's choice for #AYearofNZLit is a classic work of Kiwi Science Fiction... Wikipedia and Goodreads tell us that Born in England in 1942, Craig Harrison came to New Zealand in 1966 to lecture i...

Do people today know what a party line is? There's the political meaning i.e. the collective understanding of a political party's ideology and policies, coupled with an expectation that party members ...

This month's choice for #AYearofNZLit is Leave Before You Go (1998), the debut of novel of New Zealand author Emily Perkins (b.1970).  I haven't been able to source her short story collection Not Her ...

This month's choice for #AYearofNZLit is an historical memoir from expat New Zealand author Peter Walker.  I came across it over a decade ago when I read on Beattie's (now inactive) Book Blog that Wal...

This is a novel where silence takes centre stage and informs the entire novel. The Desert Knows Her Name is Lia Hills' second novel, coming after The Crying Place (2017) was longlisted for the Miles F...

What a pleasure it was to read this sparkling campus novel set at the Sorbonne in Paris! C.K. (Karl) Stead (b.1932) is one of New Zealand's most esteemed authors and now I know why.  The brief bio in ...