RNZ
Jenna chats with Kathryn about some of her ‘forgotten favourites’ from 2020.
Earthlings is an absurd & twisted foray into the ‘factory’ of Japanese culture.
Homeland Elegies is a modern day American auto-fiction classic - from the perspective of a Muslim American life post 9/11.
In the Dream House is a searing collection of vignettes that explore an abusive queer relationship and the history of queer relationships in pop culture.
Do you need something FUNNY to read over the holidays? Go no further than David Sedaris. This is a best of collection spanning 25 years of essays, stories and opinion pieces. Listen to Jenna’s review below.
Winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Shuggie Bain is a novel brimming with heart and soul and the writing positively gleams. Shuggie Bain is Kiran’s novel of the year and she reviewed it on RNZ’s Nine to Noon.
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon Kiran reviewed Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. A charismatic and spirited ode to friendship, this gorgeous novel is a positive and celebratory representation of male friendship. While it’s heartbreaking, it’s also a joyous headrush.
This is Jenna’s most anticipated book of the year and it hasn’t disappointed.
A coming of age story that has all of the classic Ferrante ingredients - Naples, the class divide and passionate women. Highly recommended and on the shelf now.
Listen to Jenna’s review with Kathryn below and buy the book here.
Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body…
So begins Death in Her Hands, the compelling new novel from Ottessa Moshfegh who is an expert at evoking the weird, eerie and mordantly funny. Kind of like Patricia Highsmith meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets Murder She Wrote, Death in Her Hands is a pageturner of a mystery - comic in places and pitch dark in others.
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Kiran reviewed Notes from An Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. This is a book about right now, to read right now! In search of preppers getting ready for the end of the world, O’Connell travelled to bunkers in South Dakota, to a conference in Los Angeles about the colonisation of Mars, to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to wilderness reserves in the Scottish Highlands, and… New Zealand. The result is this throughly engaging reportage-cum-travelouge which is equal parts terrifying and hilarious. Reading Notes From An Apocalypse is like listening to your brainiest and funniest friend!
In a small village in France, sits a library of unpublished manuscripts, which must be delivered in person.
A Parisian editor find a manuscript of genius while browsing the shelves. The book is published, taking the book world by storm - but is this a hoax? How can Henri Pick, a grouchy pizzeria owner, have written this when no one in his lifetime saw him pick up a pen?
A charming literary mystery with a kooky cast of characters, reminiscent of the film Amélie. Listen to Jenna’s review below and buy the book here.
A fascinating group biography of five women who lived on Melkenburgh Square between WW1 and WW2.
For fans of English literature, feminist leaders and the Bloomsbury set.
You can order the book here.
Listen to Jenna chat about Square Haunting as well as book store life in Level 2 below:
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Kiran reviewed Halibut on the Moon by David Vann which is shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Content warning: This is a powerful but dark read.
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Kiran reviewed Weather the new novel by Jenny Offill, author of the hugely, widely adored Dept. of Speculation. Set during the 2016 US election, it examines the dual catastrophe of political doom and the accelerating climate crisis with a parallel of domestic anxiety. It’s a beautifully poised and refined novel, and it’s not all doom and gloom - Weather is cheerfully wry, witty and funny.
A new novel from Anne Enright is an exciting event! Kiran reviewed Actress on RNZ’s Nine to Noon. Actress is an imagined biography of fictitious iconic Irish actress Katherine O’Dell, told through the eyes of her novelist daughter Norah FitzMaurice. It deals with legend, family, mythmaking and playing a role.
Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport a 1000 page, stream of consciousness of an Ohio mother as she bakes pies. Is it worth it? Yes!
Also, Jenna almost missed this incredible memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, republished as a Penguin Classic forty years after publication.
Listen to Jenna’s review with Kathryn Ryan below:
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon with Lynn Freeman, Kiran reviewed Make it Scream, Make it Burn: Essays by Leslie Jamison. And in this special ‘Best of 2019’ recap, she also very briefly mentioned The Years by Annie Ernaux (her Book of the Year for 2019, you can listen to Kiran’s previous full RNZ review here ) and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.
Kiran popped up to RNZ to chat to her childhood hero Karyn Hay about some of the books she read over the summer break: The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens and At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond.
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Kiran reviewed Murmur by Will Eaves. It is a mesmeric novel where science, imagination and literature intersect. It re-imagines the inner world of brilliant mathematician Alan Turing who was a computer science and number theory pioneer and WWII codebreaker. Bringing together deep philosophy, maths and the body, Murmur is also about exclusion, socio-economic stability and human rights - and what happens when these things are threatened. This exquisite novel was the winner of the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize, a prize which celebrates health and medicine in literature.
In early 2016, musical genius Prince announced that he was writing a memoir with editor Dan Piepenbring, however it was only a few months later that he died suddenly.
Piepenbring was given the task by Prince’s estate to put together The Beautiful Ones with what material they’d put together as well as full access to Prince’s Paisley Park.
The result is a lush illustrated hardback in which reading feels like you’re moving through a museum. For what material was available to put this together, it’s pitch perfect for the Prince fan.
Listen to Jenna’s review with Kathryn Ryan below:
You may remember that Jenna reviewed Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award winning The Friend earlier in the year, which still remains one of her favourite reads for 2019. When a prolific, yet not as well known author wins such a prize, publishers often go to their backlist to republish an older title to give it a second life and this is what has happened with Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, originally published in 2006.
This is a layered, intelligent and considered tale of female friendship, politics and cultural disruption in the 1960’s, New York City. Scholarship student Georgette George is roomed with the wealthy Ann Drayton at Barnard College. An intense friendship develops but ends as Ann’s journey into activism becomes more hard line and extreme.
However, Ann is brought back into George’s life years later after she is arrested for murder.
Listen to Jenna’s review below:
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Kiran reviewed our Book of the Month, Girl by Edna O’Brien. O’Brien is an important writer who has long given a voice and created a space for girls and women in crisis. This novel tells the story of Maryam, one of a group of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria. Girl will rip your heart out, but you won’t be able to put the book down. What a writer!
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon Kiran reviewed Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss who will be appearing in conversation at Time Out in October and Verb in November. It’s an atmospheric novel about 17-year-old Silvie who goes on an excursion with her mother and father to live on an archeological replica of an Iron Age settlement with the goal of living like ancient Britons did for a flavour of Iron Age life. This is a very mesmerising novel. It’s an exquisite novel, a tremendous mood piece with a heck of an impact.
