Tag: Fiction showcase

“Tea is considered a delicacy in many parts of the galaxy”: New science fiction & fantasy

Neil

“Tea is considered a delicacy in many parts of the Galaxy. However, the proliferation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Nutrimatic Machines has made it very hard to get a good cup of tea. It is also a strong Brownian Motion producer” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Who can resist the magical, mystical, restorative powers of a good cup of tea?

Well, according to Becky Chamber’s latest book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s  The Splinter in the Sky, the answer is not many of us.

In their latest novel, Becky Chambers has a tea monk who travels from place-to-place offering calming, relaxing cups of tranquillity, one brew at a time. And in Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s book, a lowly scribe wants to quit her day job and expand her fledgling tea business.

It is far from the first-time fantasy and science fiction authors have found inspiration for their plots in a good cup of tea.

There are numerous examples where this millennia-old drink plays a key part in a fantasy or science fiction work, such as the iconic mad hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Douglas Adams was also a huge tea fan; you just need to look at how important tea is in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the title of the second Dirk Gently instalment, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Other authors and books that have tea involved in their plot include Skinwalker by Faith Hunter about a vampire hunter, passionate about tea pots and single estate loose leaf teas. There is also a wonderful  tea shop in  Under the Whispering Door by T J Klune and Gail Carriger’s Soulless features a lot of tea drinking. There’s also A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin and Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta to name just a few. See our interview with T J Klune here!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built and The Splinter in the Sky are just two of our selected newly-acquired science fiction and fantasy titles; others include Marie Cardno’s fabulous How to Get a Date with the Evil Queen, the awesome Ravensong by T J Klune and Hawke’s Bay’s steampunk, Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning author Gareth Ward’s latest book Tarquin the honest Ocian’s Elven .

A psalm for the wild-built / Chambers, Becky
” It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honour the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot. ” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook. Continue reading ““Tea is considered a delicacy in many parts of the galaxy”: New science fiction & fantasy” →

Signs of life: New fiction

Neil

This month’s selection of newly acquired novels provides a rich and diverse collection of wonderful fictional works. It’s an exciting list of books, covering an incredibly wide field of works with subjects, styles, genres, authors and books hailing from across the globe.

First up, we have four fabulous new novels from our own fair shores: Signs of life by Amy Head, a delicious collection of twelve linked stories; The bone tree by Airana Ngarewa, a powerful coming of age story set in Aotearoa; The Waters by Carl Nixon, an epic work covering the fortunes of one Aotearoa family over forty years; and Resonance surge by Nalini Singh, a paranormal romance from our very own New York Times bestselling author. 

Other highlight’s this month include Kate Mosse’s latest compelling new novel in which huguenots, pirates and ghost ships play a major part that novel is called The Ghost ship. We also have a new work from the multi award-winning Scottish author Alan Warner set in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden called Nothing left to fear from hell. Plus works from international writers Abraham Verghese and Eva Baltasar.

Signs of life / Head, Amy
“Christchurch, post quakes, and the earth is still settling. Containers line the damaged streets, whose inhabitants waver – like their city – suspended between disaster and recovery. Tony, very much alive, is declared dead, Gerald misreads one too many situations in his community patrol, and boomer Carla tries online dating. At the epicentre of these taut, magnetic stories is twenty-something Flick who, just as she is finding her feet again, faces another violent disruption – this time in human form – while her mostly-ex gets set to marry.” (Adapted from catalogue)

The bone tree / Ngarewa, Airana
“After the death of both parents, Kauri and Black must find a way to survive in a world that doesn’t care much about them. Kauri embarks on a journey into his father’s past, to come to terms with the trauma he’s experienced in his short life, and to break the cycle of violence he fears perpetuating as he raises his younger brother. The Bone Tree is a gritty coming of age novel, where the unforgettable young protagonist faces immense challenges, and the stakes are life or death – yet it also has a lyrical beauty, and a powerful message of love at its heart. It gives voice to characters who are on the margins of society, raised in poverty, and who have a deep mistrust in the systems that are meant to protect them – and it considers the question of how we can best protect the ones we love.” (Adapted from catalogue)

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The 2023 Booker shortlist

Neil

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)

The old rogue of Limehouse: New detective and mystery titles

Neil

Is it the heart of the empire, or the heart of darkness?

– Peter Ackroyd, quote about London.

One of the books that caught our particular eye in this month’s selection of newly acquired detective and mystery titles was The old rogue of Limehouse by Ann Granger, an atmospheric historical crime novel set in Victorian London in the summer of 1871. One of the many great ingredients that make this book such a compelling read is its location, Limehouse.

Limehouse is an ancient district in London. The name is derived from the local lime kilns that used to be there, with the earliest known reference to the area dating back to 1356. However, it is the Limehouse’s connection with British maritime history that the area is perhaps best known for. One of London’s key ports from hundreds of years, sadly the Limehouse Basin docks closed in the late 1960s. Whilst being a vibrant and diverse community, Limehouse was also known historically for its poverty, deprivation and notorious 19th Century era opium dens. This rich, varied and interesting history of the area has proved a big lure to several writers.

Authors and novels that have taken advantage of the Limehouse area of the London, and the districts close by, to set their works in include:Alan Moore with his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel series,  Kate Summerscale with her award winning factual book The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer,  Peter Ackroyd and his excellent  Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem , The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin, the now highly problematic Fu Manchu stories by Sax Rohmer and now Ann Granger’s latest book joins this select group of writers.

The old rogue of Limehouse / Granger, Ann
“It is the summer of 1871 when Scotland Yard’s Inspector Ben Ross pays a visit to Jacob Jacobus, the old rogue of Limehouse: infamous antiquarian, friend to villains and informer to the police. Ben hopes to glean information about any burglaries that might take place now that the wealthiest echelons of society are back in London for the Season. Little does he realise that an audacious theft has already occurred – a priceless family heirloom, the Roxby emerald necklace, has been stolen from a dressing table in the Roxby residence, and the widowed Mrs Roxby is demanding its immediate return…” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Continue reading “The old rogue of Limehouse: New detective and mystery titles” →

Audition: New science fiction and fantasy titles

Neil

What I know about structures of fiction comes from hairdressing. 

– Quote from Pip Adam’s The Spinoff interview.  

Our special featured title in this month’s selection of newly acquired science fiction and fantasy titles is Audition by Wellington’s very own Pip Adam. Pip Adam is the author of four novels: Audition, Nothing to See, which was shortlisted for the Acorn Prize for Fiction, The New Animals, which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I’m Working on a Building. Her short story collection Everything We Hoped For won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction.

Audition is the title of her latest novel, and it is also the name of the spaceship in the book.
Audition is hurtling through space towards the event horizon, and squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. As they talk, they might be recovering their shared memory of what has been done to their incarcerated former selves, or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them?

Audition confirms Pip Adam’s position as one of our finest contemporary world class writers. All of Pip’s work is bold, daring, unexpected, exceptional and sometimes challenging. Audition defies categorisation, it is part science fiction and part social realism, but there is a whole lot more going on in it. Continue reading “Audition: New science fiction and fantasy titles” →

The Friday Night Club: a new novel about Hilma af Klint

Neil

‘Every time I succeed in finishing one of my sketches, my understanding of humanity, animals, plants, minerals, or the entire creation, becomes clearer. I feel freed and raised up above my limited consciousness.’ Hilma af Klint

The newly-acquired general fiction title we would like to focus on this month is The Friday Night Club by Sofia Lundberg, a fictionalised account of the real-life group of women artists formed by Hilma af Klint at the start of the twentieth century .

If you were lucky enough to see the recent exhibition of her work at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, you will be familiar with her extraordinary work. And her real life was as revolutionary as her art.

The  art world has long been male-dominated and controlled the narrative for the story of art, claiming that the first modern abstract paintings were created by male artists such as Malevich or  Mondrian. However, the mystic visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint should actually receive the credit. Inspired by mystic visions, she created her own abstract visual language years before these artists.

Hilma worked at a time when creative freedoms for women were rare and limited. Yet from this reality she created a huge body of abstract work that predated Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian or, indeed, any of the other male artists credited as inventing modern abstract art.

Hilma af Klint’s  body of work has only relatively recently been given the praise it so richly deserved, and it is clear that her work at that time rewrites the history of modern art. Hilma knew her abstract work was way ahead of its time and at her death she left instructions that her work be kept secret until at least twenty years after her death, when she hoped that society would have changed enough to accept her work.

You can access our non-fiction collection of works about Hilma af Klint here.

The Friday Night Club / Lundberg, Sofia
” Early 1900s: The world belongs to men, and the art world in Stockholm, Sweden, is no different, until Hilma af Klint brings together a mysterious group of female painters and writers-Anna, Cornelia, Sigrid, and Mathilda-to form their own emotional and artistic support system. … Over a century later, an associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum, Eben Elliot, brings the Hilma af Klint show to New York where he uncovers questions about the Five and how the modern day art world is funded, which puts him in a precarious position both emotionally and professionally, as he witnesses how history can be manipulated. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Chain-gang all-stars / Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame
” Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates…” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Retrospective / Vásquez, Juan Gabriel
“The Colombian film director, Sergio Cabrera, is in Barcelona for a retrospective of his work. It’s a hard time for him: his father, famous actor Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his home country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few intense days, as his films are on exhibit, Sergio recalls the events that marked his family’s unusual and dramatic lives: especially his father’s, his sister Marianella’s and his own. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Continue reading “The Friday Night Club: a new novel about Hilma af Klint” →