The recently published Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is an outstanding publication. Beautifully produced and thought-provoking, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists. From ancient whatu kakahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa. Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa.

How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation? With more than 150 striking images, and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, alongside Kirsty Baker, Sight Lines is waiting for a place on your art library shelf.

“An exceptional book. Thoughtfully conceived, well written, timely and significant. It manages to be both scholarly – informed by the state of art writing in the present – and accessible to a general readership interested in art, women and feminism in Aotearoa.” — Peter Brunt, Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka

• Carefully exclusionary

• Blind spots and sight lines — an art history

• Polyphonic

• Impressive spotlight

• Look inside!

• The contents

Scaffolding is the story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London, so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
”Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly — a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge
”Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin's nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.” —Guardian

• Identity, language, and desire.

• On remembering to touch base with yourself.

• Writing fiction for the first time.

• Parallel Lives

• Other books by Lauren Elkin.

The 2024 Winner of the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year is Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) with her latest book, Nine Girls. Gregg is a household name in New Zealand, and in the UK, with over 30 pony books to her name, numerous awards, along with commercial success. Nine Girls is a departure from the pony stories. Gone is the pony, but in its place is a talking eel. Titch and her whanua have moved to Ngāruawāhia. Adjusting to a small town where she feels out of place is no easy feat, but with a best friend, Tania, the lure of hidden treasure and the unexpected encounter with her eel connecting Titch to her past, adventure is never far away.

In Nine Girls Stacy Gregg draws on her own childhood, and being an outsider; she explores issues of colonisation, racism and striving to find yourself and connect with your heritage. With Gregg’s expert story-telling this coming-of-age story balances humour, adventure, and emotion — the perfect ingredients for a standout book that embraces important themes and history for both Māori and Pākehā readers.

Find out more:

• The Daunting Prospect of writing Nine Girls

• The Margaret Mahy Book of the Year

• The Judge and the Winner: An Interview

• Read an Extract

• The 2024 Winners

WINNER: Victorian Prize for Literature 2024
WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024
WINNER: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2024
SHORTLISTED: Mary Gilmore Award 2024
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Anne Elder Award 2023

Grace Yee’s debut book Chinese Fish took out the top poetry prizes in Aotearoa and Australia this year, and the Premier Literary Award in Australia. It’s sharp, provocative and laced with humour. It confronts racism, explores expectation and the complexities of migration. And it does so, brilliantly, shaking its poetic form with verve and intelligence to reward the reader with a deeply layered and thought-provoking experience.

In the words of our poet laurate, Chris Tse, it’s “an unflinchingly honest look at life behind closed doors, where resentment simmers, generations clash, and individual dreams are set aside for the interests of family.”

Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.

• Winning the Big Prize

• Left over from a PhD

• Grace Yee Reads

• Finding the Voices

• Revealing the Chinese Immigrant Experience

• Chinese Fish at Giromando

This beautifully written short novel subtly explores themes of language, isolation, and connection. When the sole inhabitant of a remote island beyond Shetland gives shelter to a person who arrives there, little knowing that the injured visitor has come to evict him, a fragile bond begins to grow between the two, despite — or because of — their lack of a shared language. Davies’s crystalline prose captures every nuance of the characters’ vulnerabilities and strengths, and is movingly evocative of its remote setting and of the contexts of the Highland Clearances in the 1840s.

• We will be discussing Clear at our next online book group on Tuesday 10 September — please join us!

• Language and isolation.

• Beauty in banality.

• No man is an island.

• Distance from herself.

• A brief introduction to the Highland Clearances.

• The Scottish Clearances, 1600—1900.

• Notes on craft.

Talia Marshall’s memoir-journey is undertaken in old cars, pauses to doss on sofas throughout the motu, and moves through place and through time until the two blur and reconfigure into a single substance, the living and the dead pushing past each other in the urgency of their stories. Marshall has a rare gift to look straight at difficulties or embarrassments from which most of us look away, and the poignancy and humour of her observations and phrasing draw us to discover humanity in places of damage, tragedy, awkwardness or uncertainty. Whether clambering the uphill slopes of Aotearoa’s less-than-shiny nowadays, peeling the layers of history and experience that make the whenua of Te Tau Ihu, encountering Te Rauparaha through her tīpuna Tūtepourangi, or dealing with the unwanted attentions of troubled or troubling men, Marshall finds strength in the women who precede her, walk by her side, or karanga to her from the future.

• Talia, haunted.

• “I always think I know better than Pākehā men in corduroy pants.”

• A walk backwards.

• A tour inside the mind.

• Continue the tour.

• Imaginings and insights.

• Look inside.

• Everyone is wrong about Ans Westra except Talia Marshall.

Sarah Perry’s new novel explores conjunctions of love, faith, and science, as her characters are pulled together, apart, and together again, moved by forces as inexorable as those that underlie the bodies they observe astronomically. What constitutes freedom in this world, and what releases us into the wonder that is our own existence? “Extraordinary and ambitious. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry's luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.” —Observer

• Find out more about the book.

• A taxonomy of love.

• The echo never fades.

• Meaning, ritual, and ambiguity.

• Orbits, collisions, and cosmic ellipses.

• Sex, God, and celestial bodies.

• The sublime and the ordinary.

• Happiness.

• Books by Sarah Perry.

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.

“An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.” — International Booker Prize judges' citation [Now in paperback!]

• Read Stella’s review.

• Join our on-line discussion of this book on 13 August!

• Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• The turbulence of history.

• Returning to East Berlin.

• “I need to get you out of my head.”

• Writing in the ruins.

• Spying, lying, and eros.

• Reading and rereading.

• Blind spots in shared memory.

• In translation.

• Other books listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read our reviews of several others of Erpenbeck’s books.

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Brotherless Night was described by the judges as ‘A powerful book that has the intimacy of memoir, the range and ambition of an epic, and tells a truly unforgettable story about the Sri Lankan civil war.’

It’s the story of sixteen-year-old Sashi who wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K's invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. She must ask herself — is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

With accolades from authors and star reviews from critics, along with taking home the prize from a very strong shortlist (iwhich included Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren) this is one to add to your pile of excellent reading.

‘A blazingly brilliant novel . . . With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how-and as importantly, why-to survive.’ — Celeste Ng, New York Times

Find out more:

• Epic, intimate and urgent

• 15 years to write

• Bearing witness

• Ganeshananthan and friends - the host gets interviewed

• Read an extract

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

• Liking Alien — Having Insomnia

• Try orbiting

• A Melville of the Skies

• Viewing from Space

• Live with the Astronauts

• The Shapeless Unease.

At once an intelligent discussion of urgent issues — from the ambivalent needs for independence and belonging that beset us individually, to our collective crises of politics, environment and climate — and an enjoyable, witty and often very funny novel that propels the reader deep into the hearts and lives of its characters, The Alternatives tells the story of four successful Irish sisters, three of whom come together to overcome their alienation from each other over the years since the deaths of the parents when they were teenagers — and decide to seek the fourth, who really doesn’t want to be found. Both deeply humane and a compelling novel of ideas.

• A geologist, a philosopher, a politician and a chef walk into a bar…

• Women who centre work in their lives.

• Even being hit by a truck didn’t stop this author finishing her novel.

• Testing the bonds of sisterhood.

• Troubled and talented.

• Follow your own path.

Rachel Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}

• Read Thomas’s ‘review’.

• Knitted cathedral.

• Relentless dismantling.

• Exterminating the novel while still writing one.

• Art, violence and freedom.

• Not feeling gendered.

• Second nature.

• Striking out against conformity.

• A leap into unknown territory.

• The feminine non-state of non-being.

• Read Thomas’s reviews of the ‘Outline’ trilogy: Outline, Transit, and Kudos.

• Read our reviews of Second Place.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time : In Search of a Common Paradise is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens — not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

”I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.” —Observer
”What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.” —Nigel Slater
”A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.” —Neil Tennant
”Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.” —Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
”No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.” —Philip Hoare

• Earthly Paradise — Review

• Hidden Relationships with Colonialism

• The Radical Potential of Gardens

• Laing on Jarman

• Laing at Home

• Home Comforts

• Books by Olivia Laing.

David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed and de-formed by his experience suffering from ME, an illness of chronic systemic dysregulation that makes ‘normal’ life impossible, fractures the supposed link between the self and its biography, narrows and distorts the focus of awareness, and disestablishes comfortable conventional notions of the ongoingness of time. Dealing not much at all with the half-life of bed and sofa that is the main occupation of the chronically ill, the book is rather a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond. Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible. The book contains much that I found compelling, thoughtful, memorable, suitably frustrating and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness. —Thomas

• Thomas interviews David Coventry.

• ME makes writing extremely difficult.

• A sense of falling.

• A novel appears.

• The Invisible Mile.

• Dance Prone.

• Transit at Marrakech.

• The author’s website.

Art is all around you, and Jamie Baird finds it on the street. For four decades he has walked the streets of Wellington with his camera, capturing both large murals in and small incursions into the urban landscape — from the loud to the quiet, from the subtle to the flashy, from the planned and approved to the furtive and the fleeting. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow is a social commentary and cultural history of one of our most dynamic cities, and in these pages you’ll find political moments and personal messages, through the imagination and talent of street artists and the tenacity of social protest — and through the lens of Jamie Baird. A fascinating book, absolutely packed with images that capture time and place, with a forward by historian Redmer Yska, and superbly designed by Matthew Bartlett. A must for Wellingtonians, past and present, and an excellent gift for anyone interested in politics, visual culture and social history.

• Jamie on Seven Sharp (starts at 4 mins 40)

• Walking the streets

• Four Decades of Street Art

• Look inside

In Long Island we meet Eilis twenty-five years on from Brooklyn. Upset with Tony and the surprising revelation of a new baby (not hers) , Eilis leaves America and returns to Ireland. In Enniscorthy little has changed, yet Eilis is perturbed; emotionally drawn to her past and what might be her future. Long Island propels you forward with ease, but under the seemingly benign runs a thread of tension. There’s the three-way complication of Eilis, her old friend Nancy and the love interst Jim. And then the problem of Tony and the children — can Eilis make a new life for herself in America? Long Island is not merely driven by its captivating plot, it is a commentary on expectation and illusion, where everyone has a private dream, but no one is honest with each other nor themselves. Colm Tóibín has a gift for capturing intimate relationships — their nuances, inconsistencies, and delusions. Brilliantly written with a deft touch, it is only at the end that the breath you have been holding will be exhaled, but only briefly.

Find out more:

• Why a Sequel?

• Masterclass in Subtlety

• Colm Tóibín on Long Island

• In conversation with Miwa Messer

• See Stella’s review

• Join the discussion in July

COUNTERFUTURES is a multidisciplinary journal of Left research, thought, and alternatives, with a focus on Aotearoa. The essays, articles, interviews and reviews are urgent, thoughtful, and vital. This issue includes:

• An interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Bifardi on ‘Futurism without a future’, and on using psychoanalysis to comprehend political events today.

• A review of Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, which situates it within a revision of the South Island myth that has occupied a privileged place in settler aesthetic traditions.

• An assessment of the 2023 New Zealand General Election by Metiria Turei, Sue Bradford, and Jack Foster, and its implications for left politics in Aotearoa.

• An exploration by Neil Vallelly of the entwined relationship between democracy and violence, as revealed in the current Israeli siege of Gaza.

• An analysis of the ‘religious right’ and its involvement in politics in Aotearoa, by Isabella Gregory.

• An overview of contesting Treaty histories, by Emma Gattey.

• Essays on the growing importance of a nationally co-ordinated union movement; the possibilities of inclusive debt forgiveness; the meeting of theory and the lived experience of sex workers in Aotearoa.

• Previous issues are available on the Counterfutures website.

“An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.” — International Booker Prize judges' citation

• Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• The turbulence of history.

• Returning to East Berlin.

• “I need to get you out of my head.”

• Writing in the ruins.

• Spying, lying, and eros.

• Reading and rereading.

• Blind spots in shared memory.

• In translation.

• Other books listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read our reviews of several others of Erpenbeck’s books.

Everyone needs to brave sometimes. Rebecca would rather be invisible. Looking down seems a good option. In Jane Arthur’s Brown Bird, we meet the kind and quiet Rebecca. She’s eleven, an excellent baker, and loves to have her head buried in a book. It’s the holidays and her plans are about to be disrupted by the whirlwind called Chester. What will Rebecca find out about herself, and is Chester as carefree as he seems? Jane Arthur, award-winning poet, perfectly captures the voice of eleven-year-old Rebecca, and expresses the uncertainties, awkwardnesses and hopes that we all experience, in her debut children’s book.

• Read Stella’s review.

• “I do love a good funnysad novel.”

• Personal histories are everywhere.

• Birth, death, and love poems.

• Calamities!

• Craven

James is an enthralling and ferociously funny novel that leaves an indelible mark, forcing us to see Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a transformed and transformative light. The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of free states and beyond. James is Jim’s story as Huckleberry Finn is Huck’s. Everett is at his most playful with the things he is most serious about: language, racism, justice, liberty; this book is clever, farcical, exuberant, unsparing — and a huge amount of fun to read.

• Race, language and art.

• His target may be language itself.

• “I hated them all.”

• Two masterpieces.

• The matrix of performance.

• Owning the language.

• Voice and power.

• The Trees.