Books to hunker down with as the shortest day approaches
With the shortest day just a week away, it really is the time of year when you want to hunker down with a good book – or three. My reading pile grows ever higher, added to by the burgeoning amount of local fiction being released …
But if novels aren’t your thing, it’s only a week until the winners of our National Flash Fiction competition are announced. As the organisers say, ‘Life is short. And so is some of the best fiction.’ I’m looking forward to reading the winning entries as chosen by this year’s judge David Eggleton, our Poet Laureate from 2019 – 22, and 2021 Ockham Award winner Airini Beautrais.
After reading Gem Wilder’s review of Soundings: Diving for stories in the beckoning sea, I’ll add this one to the pile, too. You can read Gem’s review here.
Through a series of essays, Kennedy Warne uses his own stories of sea-going adventures to ask bigger question about the wider relationship we humans have with our oceans. Living in Aotearoa, you can’t help but think about the sea and the beach which, I’m sure, is just as striking on a frosty morning as on a summer’s day.
Not that I, a night owl, would really appreciate what it looks like first thing in the morning. Philippa Gander’s book Night Owls and Early Birds may help to explain the love of late nights and perhaps improve my sleeping habits but given I’m always wanting to read one more page, probably not.
Before we get to the shortest day (22 June), keep an eye on the US where the Bram Stoker Awards are handed out this weekend. They’re billed as horror’s premier literary awards and Tauranga-based writer Lee Murray is up for her fifth Bram Stoker. Lee, our own queen of horror, last month added the New Zealand Society of Authors Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize to her trophy cabinet.
She won the annual competition, for new and unpublished works, with the manuscript Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud. Lee describes it as a “series of interconnected narrative prose-poems re-imagined from real-life narratives of the Chinese women’s diaspora in Aotearoa and linked through the classic mythology of the Chinese shapeshifting nine-tailed fox spirit.”
Cuba Press will publish her book early next year. One to ensure goes on the bedside table for late night reading.
Dionne Christian, Kete Reviews Editor