Books
The 50 best New Zealand books
by Steve Braunias
Continued from page 3...
“All the collections of Owen Marshall’s stories are excellent for their humour, satire and dark shadows, but it’s hard to beat this collection, because it includes those magnificent stories ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’ and the title story.” – Brian Turner
24. POUNAMU, POUNAMU, Witi
Ihimaera (1972).
“Short fiction that has become a classic depiction of Maori rural and urban life.” – Graeme Lay
25. THE NEW ZEALAND WARS, James Belich (1986).
“It’s the dream of every scholar to pull off a trick like Belich did in this book: to write a study of a major subject which
permanently changes the way that history is read.” – Peter Simpson
26. TIMELESS LAND, Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner and Owen Marshall (1995).
“This is a collaboration between three friends, each brilliant in his own way, whose work is deeply connected with Central Otago: poems and stories accompany 50 of Sydney’s landscapes.” – Stephen Stratford
27. THE BOOK OF FAME, Lloyd Jones (2000).
“Stands alongside Once Were Warriors as one of the two indisputably great New Zealand novels published in the past 15 years. More a prose poem than a novel, with every word lovingly handled from line-out to second-phase play, The Book of Fame not only makes the 1905 All Black tour come alive, but also rewrites history in the process.” – Denis Welch
28. POTIKI, Patricia Grace (1986).
“One of those books that is never forgotten, so emblematic of everything that is at stake in our bicultural land.” – Lydia Wevers
“Lyrical and political, embracing both legend and social commentary, Potiki is an intense book about a community under siege. It’s powerful and sad, finely balanced. (This is also the book where Grace renounced the glossary, implicitly asking us to embrace Maori in order to enter the world of the novel.)” – Paula Morris
29. BELIEVERS TO THE BRIGHT COAST, by Vincent O’Sullivan (1998).
“Did you hear the one about the madam, the nun and the chauffeur? An outstanding poet, playwright, anthologist, editor, scholar and now biographer (of John Mulgan), O’Sullivan is – unfairly – also one of our best fiction writers, as this riveting historical novel shows. Equally convincing with both contemplative and earthy passages, he is our Bellow.” – Stephen Stratford
30. PENGUIN BOOK OF NEW ZEALAND VERSE, edited by Allen Curnow (1960).
In which Curnow set a template, and a code of conduct, for New Zealand poetry, in his astute selection and remarkable introductory essay.
31. THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN COOK, James Beaglehole (1974).
“This biography followed Beaglehole’s magisterial edition of Cook’s Journals and distilled the essence of a lifetime’s scholarship in a definitive biographical study.” – Peter Simpson
32. TE PUEA, Michael King (1977).
“The first biography by our best biographer, an important subject and one of a small number of books published in the late 70s that began to fully acknowledge that we were a bicultural society.” – Chris Else
“Because it’s so beautifully written and because it taught a whole Pakeha generation about a hidden history.” – Peter Shaw
33. THE SEASON OF THE JEW, Maurice Shadbolt (1986).
“The first of his New Zealand Wars trilogy is a ripping yarn of historical revisionism, as Shadbolt’s creation George Fairbrother is caught up in Te Kooti’s campaign in Poverty Bay. Told with great gusto, it’s an exhilarating and at times moving read, and much more fun than ploughing through Belich.” – Stephen Stratford
34. DICTIONARY OF NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH, edited by Harry Orsman (1997).
“Language is everything. It shapes the way we think, speak and write. It’s the continent on which meaning is mapped. The Dictionary of New Zealand English helps people from other countries to understand us, it helps us to understand the experiences of our forebears and it allows us to understand ourselves. Besides which, it’s bloody fascinating.” – Jane Hurley
35. GOING WEST, Maurice Gee (1992).
“Stern, stoic, spare. Half a century of impeccably authentic New Zealand lives. The wars between and within the sexes consummately, compassionately anatomised. Men are from Mars; women are from Kohimarama.” – David Hill
36. THE HAUNTING, Margaret Mahy (1982).
“One of her first novels about the miraculous subverting the mundane. It won her the Carnegie Medal and almost everything else. Does anyone really understand how astonishing Mahy is? They should name planets after her.” – David Hill
37. CAME A HOT FRIDAY, Ronald Hugh Morrieson (1964).
“All Morrieson’s four novels are worth reading, but this is perhaps the best managed of them with its masterly manipulation of multiple locations and plot lines and the build up of tension to an unforgettable climax. Came a Hot Friday is also one of the great books about boozing, covering every variety of alcoholic experience from fizzing euphoria to meltdown and blackout.” – Peter Simpson
38. ALL VISITORS ASHORE, C K Stead (1984).
“A novel as fresh and sparkling and stimulating as a breeze on the Waitemata Harbour on a fine day. In lovely long flowing sentences Stead recaptures and reinvents the Auckland of his youth, in the early 1950s, when Frank Sargeson held court in his Takapuna cottage. A picaresque masterpiece.” – Denis Welch
39. ONCE IS ENOUGH, by Frank Sargeson (1973).
