RNZ book reviewer Kiran Dass, programme director of Christchurch's WORD festival, picks five favourites from her 2024 reading pile.
Hagstone
Photo: Fourth Estate
Hagstone, by the Irish writer, critic and broadcaster Sinead Gleeson, is my novel of the year so far. It's an intensely atmospheric look at art, solitude, community, folklore, human nature, the mysteries of faith and the magic of the natural world.
It's set on an unforgivingly wild and remote island off Ireland's harsh west coast, and is about an artist named Nell who is commissioned to make a commemorative artwork to celebrate a mysterious commune of women who live high up on the cliffs.
Hagstone is charged with an eeriness, and the romance of wild landscapes and art. Fans of Margaret Atwood and the classic 1973 folk horror filmThe Wicker Man will love it.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of Common Paradise
Photo: Picador
Olivia Laing is my favourite writer. I'll read anything by her, so it's thrilling she has a new book out.
Like all of her other books like The Lonely City and To the River, The Garden Against Time is a work of ecstatic beauty. I love the enchanting way she so deftly weaves together social, cultural and natural history, biography, memoir and criticism in her work.
Here, she explores the search for utopias and paradise through gardens. Gardens as places of radical change, as rebel outposts steeped in the idealism of communal dreams.
It looks at beauty but also land ownership and the politics of these spaces. And in her customary way, it's such a vital, generous and hospitable book. This is one to luxuriate in.
Lioness
Photo: Bloomsbury
Lioness by New Zealand author Emily Perkins won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
This compelling page-turner is set in Wellington and follows Therese, who has married into wealth. But her glossy, comfortable world is rocked when allegations of corruption surface around her husband Trevor's latest building development.
Lioness is such a nuanced, scalpel-sharp and sometimes bitingly funny look at blood and money, wealth, class and privilege, and the search for authenticity. There's also juicy social and political commentary.
All Fours
Photo: Supplied
Let me be honest and tell you that filmmaker, artist and writer Miranda July's work has never chimed with me before - she's a bit too indie cool for me. But her novel All Fours is absolutely brilliant and I'm so happy I read it.
It's the story of a semi-famous artist who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and young child. She's just been paid $25,000 for one sentence by a whiskey company and to celebrate turning 45, she drives alone from Los Angeles to New York, the idea being that leaving the domestic space will spark inspiration for her next art project.
All Fours is such a visionary look at midlife, sex, death and transformation. It's grubby and it's funny as hell.
July has got such a sharp sense of comic timing here which is such a joy to read and something we could all appreciate right now.
Ash
Photo: Te Herenga Waka University Press
This novel is a slim 154 pages and you'll race through it in one or two greedy gulps, with your heart thumping in your chest.
It's by the Dunedin-based writer and poet Louise Wallace (the real Louise Wallace, not to be confused with the Real Housewife), and it's set in rural New Zealand around a small vet practice where Thea has been called back to work during maternity leave.
Ash is such a good look at the domestic and professional microaggressions that surround us on the daily. It's diamond hard, crystal-clear perfection and is steeped in chaos, rage and the quiet unease of the rural gothic.