New Zealand

The Whale Rider

An international bestseller & winner of the New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award written by a multiple-award winning Maori author

Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Maori tribe in Whangara, on the East Coast of New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary “whale rider.” In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there's only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl.

Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to re-establish her people's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention, and lead her tribe to a bold new future.

“A profoundly enchanting story that will hold [you] in its grip right up to its tender conclusion.” —Curled Up

(A special thank you to book club member, Suzanne Bradley for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Baby

Cynthia is 21, bored, and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. Emptying Cynthia's father's bank account, they run away and buy “Baby,” an old boat docked in a beautiful bay, where Cynthia dreams they will live in a state of love. But when Gordon the German comes to live on board Baby, two’s company and three’s a crowd, especially when you’re a psychopath living on a tiny boat. Gordon soon becomes a rival for Anahera’s affections, and perhaps even worse than that, he dares to hold a mirror up to Cynthia and her narcissism.

“Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of Jochems’s debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coteries of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction … There are echoes here of Megan Abbott, Emma Cline, Zoë Heller and Miranda July: writers drawn to the intricacies and ferocious possibilities of female friendship. There’s a dollop, too, of Tom Ripley and a dash of Lord of the Flies. What Jochems adds is a cloying grotesqueness. Baby is a novel of close-quarters living: of masticating mouths and human stink; of piss and vomit, sunburn and bruises, pimples and dandruff; of new fat expanding under the skin. A novel of bodies.” —The Guardian

“From page one, Baby is a dryly funny study of a young woman driven to shocking acts by what seems like boredom and lust alone, devoid of any semblance of a conscience … Come to Baby for a full-blown psychopath who makes you laugh out loud despite your horror.” —The Saturday Age

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Can You Tolerate This?

A dazzling—and already prizewinning—collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.

Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young’s first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This?—the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient’s pain threshold—Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother’s fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young’s perspective expands, a series of historical portraits—a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins—strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.

Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Died in the Wool

World War II continues to rage on, and Inspector Alleyn continues to act as the Special Branch’s eyes and ears in New Zealand (a country admittedly not often thought of as playing a central role in the war). While his primary brief is spy-catching, he is happy to lend a hand in matters of old-fashioned policing, and that’s exactly what the Flossie Rubrick case initially appears to be.

A highly opinionated and influential Member of Parliament, Ms. Rubrick was also the wife of a sheep farmer, and she was last seen heading off to one of his storage sheds. Three weeks later, she has turned up—very dead, and packed in a bale of her own wool. Had she made political enemies? Had a mysterious legacy prompted her death? Or—as Alleyn increasingly thinks likely—could the shadowy world of international espionage have intruded, improbably, on this sheep farm in the back of beyond? 

Fans of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, or Dorothy L. Sayers will adore Ngaio Marsh. These four authors together are in fact known as the “Queens of Crime” though many do not realize that Marsh is actually from New Zealand. While this is the 13th novel in the Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, each novel stands alone & only a few of take place in New Zealand with the remainder taking place in the UK.

“In Marsh’s ironic and witty hands, the mystery novel can be civilized literature.” —The New York Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Trust No One

In this “outstanding psychological thriller” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by the Edgar-nominated author of Joe Victim, a famous crime writer struggles to differentiate between his own reality and the frightening plot lines he’s created for the page.

Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter—a name that has been keeping readers on the edge of their seats for more than a decade. Recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of forty-nine, Jerry’s crime writing days are coming to an end. His twelve books tell stories of brutal murders committed by bad men, of a world out of balance, of victims finding the darkest forms of justice. As his dementia begins to break down the wall between his life and the lives of the characters he has created, Jerry confesses his worst secret: The stories are real. He knows this because he committed the crimes. Those close to him, including the nurses at the care home where he now lives, insist that it is all in his head, that his memory is being toyed with and manipulated by his unfortunate disease. But if that were true, then why are so many bad things happening? Why are people dying?

Hailed by critics as a “masterful” (Publishers Weekly) writer who consistently offers “ferocious storytelling that makes you think and feel” (The Listener) and whose fiction evokes “Breaking Bad reworked by the Coen Brothers” (Kirkus Reviews), Paul Cleave takes us down a cleverly twisted path to determine the fine line between an author and his characters, between fact and fiction.

Note: This book is also great on audio though the narrator is English, not a Kiwi (aka a New Zealander).

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Wulf

Winner of both the New Zealand Society of Authors Best First Book Award & the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Wulf, Hamish Clayton's inventive, brilliant novel, explores a subject little covered in New Zealand fiction, and marks the emergence of a startlingly assured, exciting new voice.

1830s New Zealand: The great chief Te Rauparaha has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from where his tribe of Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies. Off the coast of Kapiti, an English ship arrives seeking to trade with the Maori, setting off a train of events that forever changes the course of New Zealand history.

From the very beginning, Wulf will grab you with its visual imagery. Narrated by an English sailor and conjuring up a land of power, secrets, and strangeness, this book will make you feel as if you too are trekking through dense native bush, wandering on a desolate sandy beach, and standing on a ship offshore of New Zealand knowing you are being watched by the fearsome locals.

“A powerfully imagined novel—assured, crisply poetic, and spellbinding in its unfurling narrative. . . . Clayton [is] a gifted writer for a new generation.” —NZ Books

“…the writing is so full of colour and richness that it is almost as if it is all taking place in some sort of enchanted wonderland.” —Booksellers New Zealand

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Unavailable via Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book