Books

More Than a Woman

In her successful chatty style, Caitlin Moran tells us about this passage through mid-life and Hagdom.

The Swimmers

Chloe Lane's first book brings together an array of issues and conflicting emotions as a family tries to find consensus and unity.

Eight Detectives

Very much a book for crime-fiction buffs.

The Labyrinth

Amanda Lohrey’s novel is beautifully written and compellingly personal.

A hopeful view of the future

While many may feel impotent and despairing faced with the enormity of climate change, Jonathon Porritt takes a hopeful view of the future if we move quickly enough together.

A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing

The title says it all. Jessie Tu’s debut novel is about loneliness, and the danger in being so lonely.

Travel company Jungle offers tours of disaster zones, trips that combine tourism and volunteering, survival challenges or education that leave travellers with ‘‘an inkling of superiority for having survived’’.

A Deadly Education

In A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik augments a tried-and-true recipe with the thrill of danger - think Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games – in a novel that will delight YA and adult readers.

Dealing with depression

Books about people with depression might be expected to be mood-sinkers, but that is not the case with Alastair Campbell and Jehan Casinader’s accounts of their experiences.

Saving Our Skins

Straight-shooting physicist Richard McKenzie has written of his professional and family life over the past four decades in a small-town Otago community.

Fair Warning and Law of Innocence

This year has been a stinker - no debate there. But one good thing about 2020 was American crime writer Michael Connelly has delivered two books.

Fake Law

The dangers of ‘‘fake law’’ which turns up in exaggerated media stories, political lies and can be promoted by those with vested interests, is exposed in this offering from The Secret Barrister.

Three

An attorney, Gil Hamtzani, grooms lonely women, patiently and over a long period of time, if necessary, before pouncing. He covers his traces well, so that the police shelve the cases due to lack of evidence.

A Roderick Finlayson Reader

Roderick Finlayson, in his own words, was always a lone wolf, treading hidden pathways. As Cold Hub publisher and editor, he was also a pioneering NZ writer whose legacy has long been undervalued.

Agent Sonya

Ben Macintyre's latest book recounts the undercover life of one of the most tenacious, brave, daring and redoubtable spy-ring organisers and minders from the late 1920s to 1950.

The Haunting of Alma Fielding

In cases of remembered trauma it may be impossible to determine whether what is recovered is an act of imagination, memory or both.

The Witch Hunter

Detective Sergeant Jessica Niemi of the Helsinki Police is put in charge of the investigation of the brutal murder of Maria, the wife of a famous Finnish crime writer, Roger Koponen, who specialises in spicing his novels with the occult.