From America during the Civil War to Tokyo at the millennium, from Vlad the Impaler to Harry Potter, from warnings of ecological destruction to new ways of thinking about religion, these are the year's best books, as chosen by Listener reviewers.
THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES, by Paul Auster (Faber, $35). In his 10th novel, one of America’s coolest authors throws a bit of warmth into the usual coincidence-strewn story of a bedevilled character caught between life’s lost sunlight and death’s gathering chill, pondering the freedom that accompanies the acceptance of limitations. Set in Auster’s own New York backyard, with the drumbeats of the 2000 presidential election sounding in the background, this could be the writer’s most enjoyable literary romp in more than a decade.
THE SEA, by John Banville (Picador, $34.95). Max Morden, an art historian mourning the death of his wife, takes refuge in the seaside village where he spent childhood holidays. Brimming with Banville’s sly, wry humour and finely tuned observation, this slow-moving, lyrical novel is striking not so much for its plot as for the magnificent skill of the prose. Banville ranges from past to present, weaving the story round his characters with masterful ease. Max Morden’s flailings and failings are comical and touching, and the final pages strike a genuinely moving note. A deserving winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
ARTHUR & GEORGE, by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, $59.95). Julian Barnes’s latest novel is based on the true story of a young solicitor, George Edalji, who, in 1903, was wrongly convicted of a sensational series of crimes involving the mutilation of animals. The case got the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who championed Edalji’s cause. Barnes manages to blend factual accuracy with a sympathetic depiction of two very different lives: Conan Doyle, tireless, hypersensitive, principled, oppressed by the weight of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes, and Edalji, baffled, stoical, tragically wronged. It was a case worthy of Holmes, although Barnes, faithful to history, resists the temptation of a neat ending.
A LONG LONG WAY, by Sebastian Barry (Faber, $35). World War I is famous for its war poetry – Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg – but in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, Listener reviewer Elizabeth Smither found a World War I novel that is fit to stand in that company. Five foot six and 17, Willie Dunne enlists in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers; he is so proud of his uniform that he thinks “his toenails might burst out of his boots”. But, of course, there are mixed loyalties for Irish boys fighting for the British Empire, and Willie’s police superintendent father cannot forgive his son’s compassion for the “traitors” of the 1916 Easter Rising. Barry’s lyrical prose is supple enough to take the perspective of a bird, a bed, a field.
MARCH, by Geraldine Brooks (Fourth Estate, $34.99). Even when they support unimpeachably good causes, liberals can be insufferable prigs. This theme, so dear to Nadine Gordimer, is illustrated vividly in Geraldine Brooks’s often painful tale of an abolitionist doctor encountering the realities of slavery, the American Civil War, and the unheroic motives of the people who fought it. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series is a starting point, but this isn’t smugly revisionist history. March is the best sort of historical novel, never patronising its 19th-century characters, and never assuming that we know any better now how the world really runs.
THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS, by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, $35). As provocative for its ideas as for the actual story, because Justin Cartwright’s South African background allows him an objective tilt at the middle-class British life he loves to reconstruct. The adored art-historian daughter of a highly respectable family is about to be released from a New York jail after her conviction for selling a stolen Tiffany window. The effect on her family is cataclysmic. The idea of idyllic pastoral England is thoroughly subverted, the nature of art gets a good going over, and the nearby grave of the good John Betjeman, bard of the carefree middle class, is the catalyst for some useful mythologising.
THE CONTORTIONIST’S HANDBOOK, by Craig Clevenger (Fourth Estate, $34.99). A brilliant debut. Clevenger quit his job and maxed out his credit cards to write this book, and the risk paid off. The guys who made Donnie Darko picked up the film rights and drug-savvy writers Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahnuik sang the novel’s praises. In the author’s own words, this is “the autobiography of a child prodigy forger as told via a psychiatric interview following a painkiller overdose” – or it’s “the end result of a medical textbook editor hooked on amphetamines writing a bodice-ripper romance”. Clevenger also builds in a guided tour of the seedy side of Los Angeles in the 1980s.
RESPONSIBILITY, by Nigel Cox (VUP, $29.95). Can Nigel Cox tell a hair-raising, gripping yarn? Yep. Can he tell a hair-raising, gripping yarn with oodles of black humour? Yep and yep. Can he tell a hair-raising, gripping yarn with oodles of black humour that actually makes a serious moral point? Amazingly, yep, yep and yep. Responsibility is the tale of a Berlin-based schmuck who lets himself be dragged into dumb criminal schemes at the risk of his own family. A distant descendant of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, this is the noirest of noir, but also bloody funny. And in the end a sad farewell to the lazy sort of romanticism that thinks tough-guy talk from the movies is a viable philosophy.
MONA MINIM AND THE SMELL OF THE SUN, by Janet Frame (Random House, $29.95). There are not very many perfect books. This is one. First published in 1969 and reissued now in a gloriously well-produced new edition, it takes us deep into the world of Mona Minim, a very young, ignorant, hopeful ant about to make her first trip out of the nest. The resulting adventure is a delight for young and old, thanks to Frame’s mastery of a profoundly simple device: she makes her ants entirely human, in best Beatrix Potter fashion, but she also allows them to behave like ants. The effect is wondrously strange: Katherine Mansfield meets Kafka.
BLINDSIGHT, by Maurice Gee (Penguin, $35). For years the “bucket man” plodded Wellington’s streets: thousands noticed him, but did they see him? Maurice Gee did, and the novel he wrote as a result of that seeing – a novel whose title, Blindsight, reinforces the point – is one of his best. Which is saying a lot when you look at the 14 others. Blindsight is a devastating insight into the damage done when love is withheld, denied or, like a river unable to run its true course, diverted underground.
THE CAPTIVE WIFE, by Fiona Kidman (Vintage, $27.95). Fiona Kidman made a welcome return to historical fiction with The Captive Wife, a superbly controlled retelling of the Betty Guard incident, when a Pakeha woman was abducted by Taranaki Maori in the 1830s. Kidman takes the traditional version of the incident – scandalised settlers saw it as virtual white slavery – and relocates it in a more enlightened sensibility, while avoiding the pitfalls of political correctness.
THE HISTORIAN, by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown, $35). A historical detective story about brainy busybodies on the trail of Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula), The Historian is a multi-layered narrative set in numerous gorgeous locations, from a French monastery to the streets of Istanbul. Working in plenty of gory Byzantine and Ottoman history, Kostova interweaves three major storylines: the devastating discoveries of an Oxford professor; the Cold War-era excursions of Paul, his student; and the fraught adventures of Paul’s daughter uncovering the secrets of her own dark heritage. This epic first novel – a big inter-national hit – is a page-turner that doesn’t insult your intelligence, though it may make you a bit more wary about your next European holiday.
BLOOD FROM A STONE, by Donna Leon (Random House, $36.95). The latest in Leon’s popular Venice-set series following the exploits of Police Commissario Guido Brunetti continues her run of engaging, atmospheric mysteries. In this instalment, the murder of a Senegalese street vendor, witnessed by American tourists, looks like a routine investigation – until Brunetti discovers that the victim has a fortune’s worth of uncut diamonds in his room. And the plot thickens, as plots will, when Brunetti’s despicable superior, Vice-Questore Patta, announces that the case has been transferred to another government department. Read this for Leon’s vivid evocations of Venice (the architecture, the food, the weather), her potshots at Italian bureaucracy and foreign tourists, and for a plausibly untidy outcome.
ROMANITAS, by Sophia McDougall (Orion, $35). This is your summer beach book. Alternate history: Rome never fell, slavery is the backbone of the early 21st-century world economy, and the young heir to the empire has made the mistake of saying it shouldn’t be. He wants to free the slaves. His minders, therefore, want him dead. He goes on the run. Add in some runaway slaves with psychic powers, a bunch of freedom fighters, and a love interest, and you’ve got the best light reading of the year. Sophia McDougall knows how to have fun with her material.
SATURDAY, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $59.95). McEwan’s absorbing ninth novel, a worthy follow-up to Atonement, confronts our jittery times head on. The story tracks one Henry Perowne, neuro-surgeon and rationalist “in ambitious middle life”, through a Saturday in February 2003, the day of a major anti-war rally in London. The day seems ordinary: Henry plays squash, cooks, visits his mother. But from its first scene of Henry watching a burning cargo plane descending into the still-sleeping city – and suspecting the worst – we know that this Saturday will be extra-ordinary, a day of confrontation, menace and great emotions. In this intelligent and provocative book, inexplicably excluded from the Booker shortlist, the transformative power of art is the unlikely saviour.
BEYOND BLACK, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate, $35). “There are things you need to know about the dead, she wanted to say. Things you really ought to know. For instance, it’s no good trying to enlist them for any good cause you have in mind, world peace or whatever. Because they’ll only bugger you about. They’re not reliable. They’ll pull the rug out from under you. They don’t become decent people just because they’re dead.” Like a supernatural Little Britain, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black describes the life and times of travelling medium Alison Hart, her skinny, unhappy assistant Colette and her gang of unruly spirits as they move through the (literally) soul-less new suburbs and ugly, uniform high streets of late-20th-century England performing for paying audiences. This land of the dead is more trivial and squalid than mystical and glamorous, and Mantel – who claims she once saw the devil in her garden as a child, a fact that has some bearing on this book – has a black comic sensibility. Her passages on the death of Diana – “there was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloating” – are hilarious.
THE PEOPLE’S ACT OF LOVE, by James Meek (Canongate, $35). A big novel set somewhere large and cold (Siberia, just after the Russian Revolution), this is the story of strangers in a frozen outpost of a town. Every character in this immensely satisfying book is plagued by secrets and blind passions: Samarin, the prison camp escapee; Balashov, the charismatic leader of a deeply weird Christian sect; Anna, a worldly photographer in gloomy exile; and a hundred members of the Czech Legion whose journey home is blocked by their psychopathic commander, the advancing Red Army and the vastness of Russia. Cinematic, thrilling, witty and immensely satisfying, this is an engrossing story constructed with care.
PROCHOWNIK’S DREAM, by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin, $35). Alex Miller’s seventh novel explores the tensions in the life of Toni Powlett, a painter who has been at a creative standstill since the death of his father. Struck by a line in Sartre’s Nausea, “I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late,” Powlett begins the project of rediscovering his imaginative self. Exhilarated by his artistic rejuvenation, he soon realises that it comes with a price. Does he want to remain the perfect father and husband he’s been since he stopped working, or will art transform him into a solipsistic, nocturnal creature who neglects his family? An intelligent, humane story about art and the way we depict ourselves.
HIBISCUS COAST, by Paula Morris (Penguin, $28). “Emma Taupere is a forger. Trained in China, she is hired by her on-the-make ex-boyfriend to copy two of the Auckland Museum’s Goldie portraits. Unscrupulous dealers, bitchy corrupt curators, violent alienated art students and a flower-delivering sweetie from Kumeu provide a fast, gripping plot; like Paula Morris’s first, prize-winning novel Queen of Beauty, Hibiscus Coast is a must-read. Morris is that rare thing among literary novelists: not only is she a seriously good writer – the tone doesn’t jar, the characters are satisfyingly complex, and there is an interesting reflection of the way we are now – she can also deliver entertainment.” – Lydia Wevers, Listener, October 29.
THE GIRL FROM THE CHARTREUSE, by Pierre Peju (Harvill, $39.95). “Poor little Éva,” wrote Listener reviewer Carol Cromie. “Her escapist maman is forever on the move, traipsing them from town to town, never settling, and more often than not late collecting her from a succession of schools. On one bitterly cold and wet afternoon, young Éva abandons her usual vigil at the school gates and makes a run for it – headlong into the path of bookseller Étienne Vollard’s laden van (600 kilos of hardware, 200 kilos of books, 110 kilos of Vollard). An uncompromising start for a novel, perhaps, but The Girl from the Chartreuse is mesmerising and word-perfect from the opening line.” The girl falls into a coma and lonely, book-loving Vollard recites to her from the world in his head: Goethe, Nietzsche, Hugo, Beckett, Nabokov, the Gospel According to St John – this human library, “a monument of flesh and memory”, reels them off one by one.
DANCING IN THE DARK, by Caryl Phillips (Secker & Warburg, $45). A strangely beautifully literary novel, Dancing in the Dark is the tale of a man whom W C Fields called “the funniest man I know, but also the saddest”. That man was Bert Williams, a native of Jamaica who made his name in the US as a comic “coon”, performing in blackface and oversized shoes, barely articulate but dancing superbly. “Can the coloured American ever be free to entertain beyond the evidence of his dark skin?” this Williams asks. It’s a question with some resonance for Phillips, a Jamaican-born and British-raised writer who also had to go to America to achieve success. In long interior monologues, he gets under Williams’s skin.
THE LINOLEUM ROOM, by Katy Robinson (Vintage, $27.95). The Linoleum Room is our answer to The Secret History, opening with an accidental death and a subsequent cover-up. Mia – young, complex, pregnant and (now) alone in a country house – is soon joined by her stepsister Annabelle who is escaping a relationship gone bad. From there, various siblings and friends drift in to bicker and drink away the Christmas season, while a body lies hidden in the Linoleum Room. This is the new New Zealand Gothic; a sense of impending doom permeates the story, written with a darkly skewed poet’s eye. It deserves to become a cult hit with New Zealand’s restless youth.
GILEAD, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago, $45). Twenty years after her sparkling debut, Housekeeping, Robinson manages a second novel – and what a novel it is. The deserving winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Gilead is a work of understated lyricism that still manages to convey intense passion and historical sweep. The novel takes the form of a letter written by an elderly small-town preacher, John Ames, intended for his son. Ames writes in Iowa in the 50s, but reaches back into the conflicts between his pacifist father and abolitionist grandfather around the bloody Civil War. Ames has problems of his own, mistrusting – and misjudging – the motives of his godson. A small town – and a quiet book – may seem an unlikely setting for an extended meditation on America’s tortured racial history (slavery and segregation both), but it works, perfectly.
THE METHOD ACTORS, by Carl Shuker (Shoemaker & Hoard, $29.95). “Carl Shuker’s debut novel The Method Actors is set in the ultimate version of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s ultimate city: Tokyo at the millennium. A New Zealander resident on and off in Tokyo since 1999, Shuker has produced a heavyweight text – The Method Actors clocks in at over 500 closely printed pages – that in a single leap has taken him to the forefront of the local literary bratpack. The Method Actors is designed to attract – and is worthy of – hyperbolic adjectives: it’s a fantastic bullet-train ride to Tokyo Central. Fasten your seat-belt.” – David Eggleton, Listener, September 17.
THE ACCIDENTAL, by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, $49.95). A mysterious stranger gives a bogged-down family the shake-up it needs, in this sharp, funny, perverse novel, deservedly shortlisted for the Booker and the Whitbread. Smith deftly ventriloquises an unhappy mother, sleazy stepfather, depressed teenage boy, and preternaturally cynical pre-teen daughter, as they respond to the attentions of Amber, the alluringly spiky wanderer who shows up in the middle of a miserable holiday. Over a few defining weeks, Amber wreaks havoc and sows something like love. Smith’s targets are familiar – apathy, commodification, media saturation, surveillance technology – but she attacks them with a puckish fervour that feels fresh and inspired.
ON BEAUTY, by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, $35). Zadie Smith’s third novel is a big, warm and exuberant book, loosely based on Howard’s End. On Beauty tells the story of two families, the arch-conservative Kippses and the mixed-race liberal Belseys – headed up by academic rivals Monty and Howard – whose stories run in parallel and collide with varying degrees of fireworks. From the ageing Trinidadian Mrs Kipps to the iPod-plugged youngest Belsey Levi, Smith’s strength lies in her character and dialogue – you love them for all their faults because you get to know them so well, and you could listen to them all day.
TRANCE, by Christopher Sorrentino (Jonathan Cape, $44.95). From the first page, this dense, driving and relentless American novel has the feel of a classic – of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, for example: a quasi-historical novel where an unbeat-able story is fleshed out and brought alive by a writer who knows how to hook a reader. Here, the story is of the famed Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of radical young “urban guerillas” who captivated America’s attention in the 1970s with shootings, bank robbing and their most famous stunt of all: kidnapping an heiress (Patty Hearst) who soon became their most alluring and alarming mascot.
SINCE YOU ASK, by Louise Wareham (Akashic, $32.95). This assured debut landed its writer, who grew up in New Zealand and New York, on the shortlist for the IIML Prize in Modern Letters. The novel tells the story of Betsy, a privileged young woman who finds herself in a Connecticut asylum after her life falls apart in a tangle of sex and drugs. The numb, flat narration seems thin, until we realise that Betsy’s disaffected language is as much a symptom of childhood sexual abuse as is her ungoverned behaviour. Thereafter the novel is hypnotic, uncomfortable and gripping. With restraint and tact, Wareham slowly brings Betsy out from under her bell-jar.
MARRYING BUDDHA, by Wei Hui (Robinson, $24.95). The Bright Young Thing whose last novel, racy roman à clef Shanghai Baby, was banned in her native China follows up with another racy roman a clef sure to displease the anti-decadence brigade. This time her heroine – beautiful, narcissistic Coco, reeling from the extreme reception of her last novel – finds love, sex, infamy and shopping opportunities in New York and various other swank cities before retreating to the relative calm of China. Wei Hui manages to walk the line, in very high heels, between erotic and cheesy, between adolescent and insightful, between silly and funny: she teeters on every page, but there’s something here as bold, grasping, and exuberant as contemporary Shanghai itself.
ONLY SAY THE WORD, by Niall Williams (Picador, $34.95). Trying to work his way out of grief, a writer, Jim Foley, begins a kind of memoir that details a lifetime of reading. As a child, he found the characters in Great Expectations and The Last of the Mohicans more real than the people in his Irish village. This novel, like Fiona Farrell’s Book Book, is about the power of literature to shape and inform a young reader. “Only Say the Word is a daring book. Williams takes quite a risk in writing what is really – like all of Dickens – romantic fiction. But he has an unerring gift for walking the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality: in 340 pages, he deals with all the big ones – guilt, grief, sorrow and redemption.” – Marion McLeod, Listener, April 9.
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN, by M John Harrison (Gollancz, $29.99). M John Harrison is a cult figure: to appreciate him, you need to love challenging literary writing, and you need to love high-octane, science-based speculative thinking. The overlap of the two groups is somewhat small. For those with all the necessary taste buds, however, Harrison is a god: one of literature’s best-kept secrets these 30 years. This is his career summation collection, 23 stories chosen from the past three decades, showing off the spectacularly bizarre full range of his abilities. Gold.
WATCH OF GRYPHONS AND OTHER STORIES, by Owen Marshall (Vintage, $27.95). Some story collections simply pile together enough pieces to make up a book, and others feature so much cross-connected plotting and recurring characters they nearly quality as novels. Owen Marshall’s new collection stakes out its ground between the two extremes, presenting a hugely varied array of stories in a carefully orchestrated sequence, so that we move easily from theme to theme and from motif to motif, each story handing us on to the next. The pace feels relaxed, but that’s an illusion: by the book’s end, Marshall has taken us deep into the human mind.
FESTIVAL OF MIRACLES, by Alice Tawhai (Huia, $29.99). Alice Tawhai’s first collection is skewed, beautiful and deep. Tawhai’s New Zealand is layered, complex and full of bright flashes, like phosphorous in the waters. Her imagery is as fresh and odd as a child’s. Her characters are Maori, Italian, Lebanese and Japanese. As Tawhai writes of one, she might say of all: “Sundae was a man with no last name and no birth certificate. That didn’t stop him from being entitled to a history.” Like Fellini in La Strada, Tawhai shines a light onto the dark side of everyday life – and at the same time leaves you elated.
LIKE WALLPAPER, edited by Barbara Else (Random House, $18.95).Barbara Else has edited a series of excellent kids’ anthologies for Random House. This year, there’s Like Wall-paper, a collection for teenagers that offers sex, family violence, sex, underground adventures, poetry, race. And did we mention sex? The much-published and highly proficient – James Norcliffe, Fleur Beale, Jane Westaway, Bill Nagelkerke – are here. So are the newly published and highly gorgeous – Samantha Stanley and Natasha Lewis. Twenty stories that often provoke and never patronise.
SUPER FREAK, by Brian Falkner (Mallinson Rendel, $16.95). Jacob John Smith is shoved around at school and in life. Shall he use his handy special gift of mind manipulation and become Capt Marvel? Or perhaps Col Swine? A career as the planet’s greatest crim attracts, but the hours suck. Then there’s the disturbing tendency of evil intentions to bring benign results. Flat out, full on, in ya face, up ya nose, and other qualities unredeemed young males love.
THE SEA OF TROLLS, by Nancy Farmer (HarperCollins, $18.99). One of the very best Harry Potter side effects is that talented new writers are flocking to children’s fantasy in droves. Exhibit A: Nancy Farmer. In this foray into Norse and Saxon myth, she easily pulls off the first feat required of her by the genre, giving us the wish-fulfillment satisfaction of watching a sympathetic child hero survive fearsome trials, outwit Vikings and learn heavy-duty magic. But she also dodges the genre’s worst cliché, by refusing to dole out “good” and “evil” badges to her characters. Yes, derring do and moral sophistication. And she tosses off a neat little retelling of Beowulf in passing.
DREAMHUNTER, by Elizabeth Knox (Fourth Estate, $24.99). The miraculous is just a room away in Elizabeth Knox’s fiction, and in her first young adult novel Dreamhunter, a girl begins to enter the eerie, arid mindscape called the Place. It’s a rite of passage story, an adventure yarn, a fantasy whose imaginative daring makes you keep jacking your bottom jaw back up. Gothic darkness, talismans and runes, poems and chants, secrets in high places, too many adjectives. The miraculous and the mundane are wonderfully juxtaposed. There’s terror and transfiguration, and a rotten cover.
KAITANGATA TWITCH, by Margaret Mahy (Allen & Unwin, $15.95). Margaret Mahy, nicely recognised earlier this year in Tessa Duder’s excellent literary biography, does it yet again. “It”, in Mahy’s case, being her ability to mythologise the mundane, and take young readers to the top of their imaginative reach. There’s an island with voices, and shapes with no faces. The solid earth shudders. And it all happens against a background of – brace yourself – housing subdivision. How does she do it? Genius and half a century of hard work help.
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, by J K Rowling (Bloomsbury, $49.99). Naysayers may whine that the sixth volume of Rowling’s wizard saga lacks the zing of Order of the Phoenix, and plot-spoilers everywhere, from book reviews to school playgrounds, may have defused the shock of the climax – ignore them all. The latest Potter instalment still has the power to astound, entertain and move the reader. There’s teen romance here, of course, but boarding school frolics take second-place to revelations of treachery, the discovery of mountainous new challenges, and the ferocious preparation for all-out war in the forthcoming final book.
HEARTLAND, by Neil Cross (Scribner, $34.99). Neil Cross’s account of his childhood and adolescence in Bristol and Edinburgh has the verve of fiction – Cross’s last novel, Always the Sun, was Booker longlisted – and the vulnerability of autobiography. At the age of five, Neil’s mother walks out; two years later, she comes back, with Derek Cross. Neil’s new stepfather is a formative influence – they read books together, watch movies, go tramping – but he is also a “peculiar” man: a South African white supremacist who has been married five times, beats the dog and decides his new family needs to convert to Mormonism. “By writing this memoir,” thought Listener reviewer Lindsay Rabbitt, “Cross may be exorcising the ghost of the stepfather he loved, then loathed.” These days, Cross is a happily married father of two, living in Lower Hutt.
ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY, by Nick Flynn (Faber, $28). Don’t be misled by the title: this is a smart and serious memoir in which young American writer Flynn tries to reconstruct his father’s wasted life, from alcoholism and jail time to temporary refuge at a Boston homeless shelter, where father and son meet up again. Flynn’s unflinching memoir, fragmentary and sometimes impressionistic, is as much the story of the “invisible” men of the shelter as a tell-all about his own family life. Honest, articulate and wry, Flynn takes liberties with the form (throwing in a mini-play or two, and a chapter of “thirteen random facts”) as he navigates fact and fiction, madness and sanity, love and sadness, both in his own messy life and at the shelter.
THIS PIECE OF EARTH, by Harvey McQueen (Awa Press, $34.99). This memoir was published in 2004, but it has been – apt metaphor – a grower. It’s a garden journal that tracks the seasons in McQueen’s piece of earth, in the hilly Wellington suburb of Northland. It begins in the bleak midwinter – July/August – which aficionados will tell you is the true start to the gardening year. “His narrative grows … well, organically,” wrote David Hill in the Listener. “You stroll along with him, hands behind back. He points out this, snaps you off a bit of that, tells you how these ones flourished and those ones turned up their toes. Sections often have the pace of a back-fence natter, and that’s appropriate.”
ISTANBUL, by Orhan Pamuk (Allen & Unwin, $35). This memoir by the great Turkish writer – his portrait of the artist as a young man – is his love song to a city he can’t escape. “Istanbul’s fate is my fate,” he says, declaring that, unlike many other writers, his imagination isn’t fed by exile. “I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.” Pamuk evokes an uncertain, secretive Istanbul, now “poor and confused”, a “city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy”, in superb detail, reflecting his first love, painting. The result is a roaming, unromantic narrative that resists traditional chronology and conclusions. Sad that the ambivalence and idiosyncracies that make this book so outstanding have got Pamuk into trouble: he’s about to stand trial under controversial new laws in Turkey, charged with denigrating his homeland by criticising its human rights record.
The best books of 2005 were selected and reviewed by Elizabeth Alley, Jon Bywater, Gordon Campbell, David Cohen, Jolisa Gracewood, Charlotte Grimshaw, David Hill, John Ip, Rachael King, David Larsen, Philip Matthews, Tze Ming Mok, Paula Morris, Nicholas Reid, Terry Snow, Louise Wareham, Denis Welch and Vaughan Yarwood.