When once you have tasted flight: New fiction

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When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

– Leonardo DaVinci

Welcome to this month’s selection of recently acquired fiction titles. To make this month’s choices we have employed a broad and panoramic approach, picking titles that convey the wide variety of subject matters, literary styles and approaches present in all our new intake books.

This month’s collection of titles includes a new historical fiction novel by Sara Ackerman called The uncharted flight of Olivia West, inspired by the Dole Air Race of 1927. This is a gripping story, based on true events, about a young pioneering aviator participating in the race. Literary legend Isabel Allende has released a new novel, called The wind knows my name. We have two highlights from Aotearoa, an outstanding collection of new short stories from the iconic Aotearoa author Patricia Grace, titled Bird child & other stories, and the much-anticipated debut novel from Olive Nuttall called Kitten. There’s also The Tearsmith by Erin Doom, which is currently being adapted into a Netflix series. To round things off in style, we have the Booker shortlisted and winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.

Links to all these titles, and a few others, can be found below.

The uncharted flight of Olivia West / Ackerman, Sara
“This extraordinary novel, inspired by real events, tells the story of a female aviator who defies the odds to embark on a daring air race across the Pacific. 1927. Olivia “Livy” West is a fearless young pilot with a love of adventure. She yearns to cross oceans and travel the skies. When she learns of the Dole Air Race–a high-stakes contest to be the first to make the 2,400 mile Pacific crossing from the West Coast to Hawai’i–she sets her sights on qualifying. But it soon becomes clear that only men will make the cut. In a last-ditch effort to take part, Livy manages to be picked as a navigator for one of the pilots, before setting out on a harrowing journey that some will not survive.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Continue reading “When once you have tasted flight: New fiction”

2023 Ngaio Marsh Award Winners

Huge congratulations to the recently announced winners of the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards!

The judges had a formidable task as this years  longlist was so strong. However in the end they came to a decision and…

The wonderful Charity Norman picked up the Best Novel accolade for Remember Me; you can see our exclusive interview with Charity Norman Below.

Her winning novel Remember Me is a powerful, suspenseful, multi-layered, page-turning, contemporary thriller set in a close-knit New Zealand community. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a young woman twenty-five years previously.

The Best First Novel went to excellent Better the Blood by Michael Bennett and the non-fiction award was won by Steve Braunias for acclaimed Missing Persons.

The Ngaio Marsh Awards originated in 2010 for excellence in New Zealand crime, mystery and thriller writing. In 2016 the award for Best First Novel was added and in 2017 another category was also added for the Best Non-Fiction.

To accompany the awards, we recently had the great pleasure of seeing Charity Norman in full flow hosting an evening panel of criminally good conversation at our event Karori Mystery in the Library, a recording of which you can watch below.

 

Overdrive coverRemember Me, Charity Norman (ebook)
A heartfelt, page-turning suspense novel from the bestselling author of The Secrets of Strangers – ideal reading-group fiction, perfect for fans of Jodi Picoult and Liane Moriarty.

Also available as a Physical copy. 

 

Better the blood / Bennett, Michael
“Hana Westerman is a tenacious Māori detective juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland’s Central Investigation Branch. When she’s led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a secret room. Hana and her team work to track down the killer, searching for New Zealand’s first serial killer.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

Missing persons / Braunias, Steve
“Twelve extraordinary tales of disappearance: a collection of true crime writing by New Zealand’s award-winning master of non-fiction. Former journalist Murray Mason, found dead in the Auckland Domain; the mysterious death of Socksay Chansy, found dead in a graveyard by the sea; the tragic disappearance of backpacker Grace Millane, victim of public enemy #1; the enduring mystery of the Lundy family murders… These are stories about how some New Zealanders go missing – the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (Adapted from  Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

The 2023 Booker shortlist

The 2023 Booker shortlist has been announced, with the longlist now whittled down to just six books.
It is an incredibly varied and diverse selection of works featuring books by six authors, none of whom have ever been previously shortlisted for the Booker, and includes two debut novels.

The range, depth and diversity of the titles shows how healthy the worldwide literary fiction scene is.  Selected novels range widely in genre, with writers also coming from very different social and cultural backgrounds. These works engage in very different ways with many of the most pressing issues of our times; such as erosion of personal freedoms, immigration, climate change, political extremism and the persecution of minorities.

The six shortlisted titles are:

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced in London, on November 26, 2023.

The full Booker 2023 shortlist is available to borrow or reserve from the library and is listed below:

The bee sting / Murray, Paul
“The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home…” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Western lane / Maroo, Chetna
“After the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Gopi, who has been playing squash since she was a small child, is enlisted in a quietly brutal training regimen by her father, and soon the game becomes her world as she slowly distances herself from her sisters in hopes of becoming the best.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Also available as an eBook.

Prophet song / Lynch, Paul
“A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Also available as an eBook.

 

This other Eden : a novel / Harding, Paul
” In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination…” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

If I survive you / Escoffery, Jonathan
“In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Study for obedience / Bernstein, Sarah
“A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings–more than she cares to remember –from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs–collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case…” (Catalogue)

Birnam Wood: Our September eBook Club pick!

eBook Club pick: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Read the book that everyone wants to read.

For free and without any waiting.

Welcome to the WCL eBook Club, where each month we highlight a popular eBook in our digital collection and give access to an unlimited number of downloads on Libby. That means no waiting in long reserves queues- you’ll get instant access to our monthly popular pick!

From September 1st till September 14th, our eBook Club title is the international bestselling sensation everyone is talking about Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.

Birnam Wood was one of the most hotly anticipated novels of 2023, both here and overseas. It was released to rave reviews; the Guardian described it as “a dark and brilliant novel about the violence and tawdriness of late capitalism”. Inspired in part by Birnam Wood in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, one of the key subjects in the book is the battle to save a guerrilla community garden project in Christchurch called Birnam Wood.

This stunning novel was only released a few months ago and has dominated the fiction best-seller lists ever since. Birnam Wood has already featured heavily on many of the hot, must-read lists for the year.

We decided that the demand for Birnam Wood was such that we had to make it our September eBook club title pick.

Continue reading “Birnam Wood: Our September eBook Club pick!”

Poker, Poverty and the Power of Storytelling: 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award longlist revealed

 

A poker-playing sleuth, a poet’s gritty take on life on Aotearoa’s poverty line, a rural mystery entwined with heart-wrenching exploration of dementia, and the long-awaited return of a master of neo-noir are among the diverse tales named today on the longlist for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.

 Now in their fourteenth season, the Ngaio Marsh Awards celebrate excellence in New Zealand crime, mystery, and thriller writing. They are named for Dame Ngaio Marsh, one of the Queens of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, who penned bestselling mysteries that entertained millions of global readers from her home in the Cashmere Hills. “I’d like to think Dame Ngaio would be proud of how our modern Kiwi storytellers are continuing her literary legacy, bringing fresh perspectives and a cool mix of fascinating tales to one of the world’s most popular storytelling forms,” says awards founder Craig Sisterson. “In recent years we seem to be going through our own golden age, with our local writers offering a treasure trove of terrific stories for readers at home and all over the world.”

The longlist for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel includes a mix of past winners and finalists, several first-time entrants and new voices, and the long-awaited return of one of the leading lights of the early 2000s New Zealand literary scene. “In crime and thriller writing it’s natural for authors to make it really tough on their characters,” says Sisterson, “but our entrants made it tough on our judges too. This year’s longlist is a wonderful showcase of Kiwi creativity, with a great range of stories that explore some deep and very important issues in among the page-turning intrigue and thrills.”

The Ngaio Marsh Awards have celebrated the best New Zealand crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing since 2010. The longlist for this year’s Best Novel prize is:

The longlist is currently being considered by an international judging panel of crime and thriller writing experts from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Finalists for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Non-Fiction will be announced in August, with the finalists celebrated and the winners announced as part of a special event held in association with WORD Christchurch later in the year.

And in recent months we have been honoured to host several events in conjunction with Ngaio Marsh Awards featuring some of the longlisted authors and you can watch our recordings of these fabulous events below or by visiting our You Tube channel by clicking here.

Cormac McCarthy, a leading literary figure, has passed

The American author Cormac McCarthy passed recently. He was widely recognised as one of the finest writers of his generation. He wrote twelve novels, five screenplays, two plays, and short stories. His body of work was widely acclaimed both in his home country and internationally, with his 2006 apocalyptical novel The Road “simultaneously harrowing, bleak, powerful and humane” winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. One reviewer even described it as the best book on parenting ever written! Just before his death and sixteen years after his previous novel, he released two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, almost back-to-back. Both are superb examples of his writing. Many of his works were adapted for the screen such as No Country for Old Men which won four Oscars. All the Pretty Horses, Child of God and The Road were also made into notable movies.

It is very difficult to pigeonhole his whole body of work, but he did write books that can in places be described as southern gothic, post-modern westerns, and sometimes with overt apocalyptical overtones. His books are superbly written using sparse attribution and punctuation and often employ graphic descriptions of violence.

He was also a member of American Philosophical Society and even wrote a paper on the nature of human unconscious and the origin of language. He kept his political opinions private, and his books can be interpreted in many ways. One hint as to his political leanings was his secret plan to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona. He was a deeply private writer who rarely gave interviews or attended public events.

No country for old men / McCarthy, Cormac
“A harrowing novel set in the American West, now an Academy Award winning film starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

 

All the pretty horses / McCarthy, Cormac
“John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. “All the Pretty Horses” is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Child of God / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters’ Village Voice” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

 

The road / McCarthy, Cormac
“Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Road tells the story of a father and son as they journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape that has destroyed most of civilization.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

The passenger / McCarthy, Cormac
“Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit–by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Stella Maris / McCarthy, Cormac
“Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1972: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West / McCarthy, Cormac
“Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, “the kid,” a boy of fourteen.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

Suttree / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’ Times Literary Supplement” (Adapted from Catalogue)