FICTION
AFTER THE FUNERAL AND OTHER STORIES
by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
The fourth collection of short stories by the master literary stylist are melancholic but emotionally satisfying and hew to earlier themes, exploring transgressions between siblings, parents and spouses and burrowing into life’s many disappointments and consolations.
AUDITION
by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Three giants are hurtling through space towards a black hole in the Wellington author’s fourth novel. True to form, it’s a strange and not straightforward story, examining how society treats people who don’t fit the mainstream.
BE MINE
by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury)
In the fifth Frank Bascombe novel, one of the US’s best stylists narrates the road trip the now septuagenarian Frank takes with his 47-year-old dying son to Mt Rushmore. Wry, rich, full of quiet sadness.
THE BEE STING
by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)
Shortlisted for the Booker is this novel from the Irish author of Skippy Dies, a tragicomedy about the Barnes family. Absorbing, surefooted, with engaging prose, it is both deeply funny and deadly serious.
A BETTER PLACE
by Stephen Daisley (Text)
The 2016 Ockham NZ Book Awards winner has written a powerfully visceral, poetically told tale of
Taranaki twin brothers who head to Crete to serve their country.
BIRD LIFE
by Anna Smaill (THWUP)
Long-awaited new novel from the author of the Booker-longlisted The Chimes tells the magical realism-inflected story of two connected women in Tokyo, each dealing with trauma and exploring friendship, grief and madness.
BIRNAM WOOD
by Eleanor Catton (THWUP)
The Kiwi Booker winner’s third novel is a literary thriller, centrally concerning a rogue billionaire and an idealistic team of guerrilla gardeners in the South Island, but which also offers a critique of leftist politics and New Zealand society, as it steadily builds to a dramatic crescendo.
THE BONE TREE
by Airana Ngarewa (Hachette)
Dark though beautifully written debut about two boys, Kauri and his little brother Black, who live free and truant days in the shadow of what seems to be Mt Taranaki. Kauri goes seeking family truths.
CAHOKIA JAZZ
by Francis Spufford (Faber)
A murder-mystery set in 1920s America, with jazz and speakeasies, but where a pre-Columbus multiracial civilisation has continued to thrive by the Mississippi River. An immersive, pleasurable world, with plot and action to burn.
THE COVENANT OF WATER
by Abraham Verghese (Grove Atlantic)
This old-fashioned, beautifully written, 700-page family saga set on south India’s Malabar Coast follows a family suffering an affliction where, in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.
CUDDY
by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury)
The many afterlives of Cuddy, or St Cuthbert, after the death of the bishop and unofficial patron saint of England’s northeast in 687AD, told in multiple voices and viewpoints through time.
DAY
by Michael Cunningham (Fourth Estate)
Sensitively written novel from the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author ofcircles a fragmenting family in Brooklyn, a couple and her beloved younger brother, and their growing children,
