Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Catherine Chidgey’s ninth novel contains echoes of her 2025 bestseller The Book of Guilt. The setting is again the ‘near future’ of a dystopian Britain, the tone is sinister, and things are not what they seem on the surface. While The Book of Guilt was an expansive novel, exploring ideas to do with nature versus nurture, unwitting sacrifice ...

Sarah Ell’s first work of historical fiction for adults, A Sky Full of Fire, is a beautiful, eerie and suspenseful account of the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera. It draws extensively on Ell’s passion for New Zealand history with the perfect balance of historical detail and storytelling drama.

The prologue sets the scene for the biblical destr...

Joseph Trinidad’s debut essay collection seems to relish its own existence, and this is a joy in which readers can share. It celebrates expression, for Trinidad can certainly write a scene – from memory, from imagination, and often from a combination of the two. The reader is treated to family meals, sex, medical encounters and superstitiously prized pets. Th...

This is Mia Farlane’s second novel, following her 2009 debut Footnotes to Sex, published in Britain by Penguin Random House. That novel, which could be described as lesbian chick lit, was applauded by reviewers for its emotional honesty and humour.

And How Are Things With You is a more sombre work with flashes of comedy, often of gall...

Craig Cliff’s new story collection arrives sixteen years after his first, the award-winning A Man Melting. He has published two novels in the interim, but it could be argued that the short story reveals him at his most adept and engaging as a writer.

‘Much has changed’ in the last sixteen years, Cliff notes wryly in the new book’s acknowledgem...