Jenna called into the studio for Time Out’s last session for the year! Listeners texted in for book advice, including sci-fi for teens, Egyptology for an 8 year old and non-mainstream reads for a dude. Jonny needs a summer read too, plus some advice on 2024 cookbooks.
Time Out is open from 9am-9pm to help with all your Christmas needs. Gift wrapping included.
Listen below!
Suri & Jonny are in the studio with a HEAP of Christmas recommendations.
Listen in for some agony aunt answers - including advice on science fiction, graphic novels and self help.
Then, Suri picks out some of her top gift picks, including:
Time of the Child by Niall Williams
The Garden of Time by Olivia Laing
James by Percival Everett
The Gavin Bishop Treasury
What I Ate by Stanley Tucci
Ātūa Wāhine by Hana Tapiata
Click the link below for audio.
Jenna & Jonny talk Juice, the new dystopion novel by Australian living legend, Tim Winton. This pacy novel set in the North Western Australian desert, imagines a world of climate crisis but underpins the fear with the hope of humanity.
Listen to the full review below.
Jenna chatted to Nine to Noon’s Kathryn Ryan, about Ali Smith’s new dystopian novel, Gliff.
The companion novel, Glyph, will be released in 2025.
Listen below!
Author of the National Book award-winning title Between the World and Me, Ta Nehisi-Coates returns to non-fiction with The Message. In this concise but powerful title, Nehisi-Coates explores the human impulse to mythologise the world around us.
Part travelogue, part history, Ta Nehisi-Coates moves between Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine to reveal the connective tissues that allowed for the exploitation of certain ethnicities in all three countries. Coates explores how racism and colonialism are constructed in the pursuit of capital and in the process of national-building.
A great intro to the history of segregation and colonialism, The Message is the perfect gift for a new reader of critical theory and a great companion to Baldwin, Arendt and Fanon.
Listen to Suri’s review in the 95bFM studio with Jonny below.
Jenna dives into the newly minted 2024 Booker winner, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Orbital is due back in stock in December - order below!
Listen to Jenna’s review with Jonny below, as well as some big gig chat from the weekend.
The third title in Hari Kunzru’s Colours trilogy, Blue Ruin is a COVID-era novel taking aim at the art world. The novel follows Jay, a former artist whose descent from rising young art star to middle-aged manual labourer leaves his body and heart in disrepair. Crossing paths with his former lover Alice and her husband Rob (Jay’s art-school rival and a benefactor of wealthy corporate philanthropists), Jay’s life begins to take new shape.
Blue Ruin shifts between the 1990's and current day, covering the Young British Artists movement and the COVID-era landscape. Exploring the relationship between philanthropists and artists, between art and assets and between artistic integrity and survival, Blue Ruin unveils the winners and losers in art and in life and the financial precarity of those who lose.
Listen to Suri’s review in the 95bFM studio with Jonny below.
Hollie spoke to Ali Smith ahead of the publication of her new novel, Gliff.
Your new novel Gliff nods to dystopian fiction - is there something in our current climate that inspired this?
Er ... how could there be? Everything is such sweetness and light nationally, internationally, geopolitically and climate-wise and right now, and the future looks ever rosier! I'm clearly being ornery on purpose for some dark personal reason writing something mildly dystopian... but between you and me, there's very little, in fact nothing, in this book (except for a creaky (literally) metaphor involving red paint) that isn't already happening somewhere in the world.
Is there anything you can tell us about the connection between Gliff and its companion novel Glyph (coming 2025)?
Forgive me, I can't. If I do, the unwritten book will run off like a creature in the wild that's seen me see it.
The Accidental is one of my favourite books of yours, what do you think is the biggest thing that’s changed about your writing since it was published?
Thank you. I've no idea. I try not to think about it, because the more conscious you are if you're writing fiction, I find, the less the un- and sub- consciousnesses necessary can find their way through the tough hide of the conscious.
How do you structure the layout of a story? Do you write with an outcome in mind?
Never. What would be the point of writing something if you already knew what happened?
Favourite bookstore moment?
When Euan, one of the booksellers in the Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh, said I could have his spare ticket for one of the Taylor Swift concerts if his brother in law didn't want it or couldn't make it. As it happens, his brother in law did want it and could make it. But even the thought of the offer moved me, which is why the latest book is dedicated to that independent bookshop and its marvellous booksellers (and by extension to all marvellous booksellers, as a model of their typical generosity).
What author or book is a recent discovery for you?
Joanna Kavenna. What a writer. Check out her story, The Beautiful Salmon, in a recent Paris Review.
What is your favourite snack to enjoy while writing?
Grapes.
Jenna visited the studio this morning to give a rundown on the upcoming announcement of the 2024 Booker Prize (November 13th NZD time and talk about the deut Dutch shortlistee, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
Set in the 1960’s, in a house in a small Dutch village, Isabel’s rigid routine is upended when her brother’s new girlfriend comes to stay for the summer. However, not is all what it seems.The less you know about this book, the better!
Clcik the link below to listen to Jenna and Jonny’s chat.
Jenna phoned from the shop floor to talk about Wellington author Damien Wilkins’ new book, Delirious.
As Mary and Pete prepare to move out of their home and into a retirement village, the past comes back to visit. A deceptively simple read that is masterly crafted about family, memory and grief.
Listen to Jenna & Jonny at the link below.
The queen of South American horror fiction is back with a new collection of short stories for the spooky season! From hauntings, cults, surgical disasters and beyond, Mariana Enriquez’s new book ‘A Sunny Place for Shady People’ explores the human-made violence and terror inflicted in unique ways onto each of her characters. From body horror, ghosts and psychological torture, this short story collection has something to sate the appetite of all fans of horror.
Pre-order now to nab your copy just in time for Halloween!
Jenna was back in the bFM studio this morning after being overseas. First, she delves a little into her booky trip to the UK. Then, talks about the highly anticipated sequel to Auē, Kataraina.
Listen to the spoiler free chat with Jonny below, you can also read her spoiler-filled review on The Spinoff here.
Finally, Jenna also chats about Aotearoa NZ Bookshop Day, which is this Saturday 12th October.
Click on the covers to shop!
TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
Winner of the 2018 International Booker Prize and 2018 Nobel Prize for literature, Olga Tokarczuk returns to fiction with a heady, atmospheric 'health resort horror story'.
Written 100 years after the publication of The Magic Mountain, The Empusium is written both as a response and a feminist retelling of Thomas Mann's canonical work.
We follow Miczyslaw Wojnik's arrival at a sanatorium set in the lush and dense mountainous forests of Germany, where the alpine air is touted as an antidote to all its inhabitants' ills.
Following strict regimens of diet and exercise and using their downtime to muse on the state of a nation on the brink of war, the patients are aware of beady eyes following every move- are they being watched by the staff? Or is there a more sinister presence lurking in the shadows of the mountain fauna?
A novel filled with socratic dialogue and a rich, divinical atmosphere, The Empusium is a stunning and sinister exploration into the roots of facism and misogyny, as relevant today as it's predecessor was almost a century ago.
I pānui a Abby i Pātea Boys/Ngāti Pātea nā Airana Ngarewa mō Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori. Ka kōrero ia ki a Jonny mō tēnei pukapuka whakamīharo: (arohamai, e ako tonu ana ahau!)
From the bestselling author of The Bone Tree comes a lively and playful bilingual collection of stories about growing up in Pātea. Interlinked and full of recurring characters, these stories are about growing up in small-town Aotearoa - sneaking away during cross country or doing bombs while the lifeguard isn't looking.
The collection is designed to bridge a gap between children's books in te reo and full-length literary works. With each story featured in both English and te reo Māori, it's the perfect resource for those on their reo learning journeys as well as for readers who enjoyed The Bone Tree.
Biting, sharp and funny, ‘Help Wanted’ by Adelle Waldman follows the daily rhythms and tribulations of workers in the big box megastore, Town Square. Desperate to escape the grips of their line manager Meredith, the employees band together to plot her removal.
Shifting perspectives between the workers, this novel explores the unimportant but omnipresent rules and structures governing the daily lives of workers chained to their jobs and class.
Irreverent, funny and whip-smart, ‘Help Wanted’ is a millennial workplace novel that unearths the bureaucracy of management and the physical and mental aches of working class life in America.
Abby and Jonny chat about Brat, the debut novel from Gabriel Smith:
Jonas Gabriel is an aspiring writer struggling to come to terms with the death of his father and the terminal illness of his mother. Suffering from a rare condition that makes his skin to peel off like a reptile, he can’t seem to stop offending relatives and family friends, often at considerable physical cost to himself.
Escaping the spectre of the girlfriend who has left him and the literary agent chasing him for the novel he has not even started, he returns to his family home to prepare it to be sold. Alone in the house, his skin shedding in ever-increasing frequency and quantity, with nothing but benzos, booze and memories for company, things take an uncanny turn: a manuscript for a novel written by his mother keeps changing, an old home video is similarly unstable and may reveal unsettling secrets, the house is becoming encased in Russian vines and a man dressed as a deer keeps appearing in the back garden.
While handling age-old themes of mortality, familial love and the impermanence of art, Brat is not quite like anything you’ve ever read before. At once a dark and disquieting ghost story, a unique and brilliant meditation on grief, and a profoundly funny Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education is anything but sentimental, it is a work of electrifying originality and bravura virtuosity by a major new literary talent.
Listen below!
Suri talks to Jonny about Sheila Heti’s latest memoir which is an exploration of form and a radical experiment in diary writing.
Each chapter includes diary entries out of chronological order and in a system of alphabetisation- every sentence within a chapter begins with the same letter. From reading Faulkner to kissing in the supermarket, Alphabetical Diaries offers an intimate insight into the minutiae of Heti’s daily life and habits with a playful, poetic flair.
Listen below!
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