THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

New Zealand writer Joy Cowley has received the country's top honour in the 2018 New Year Honours list. The 81-year-old heads the list of 179 New Zealanders named this year, and is the only person to be made a member of the Order of New Zealand. The Order of New Zealand [ONZ] recognises outstanding service to the State and people of the country. Ms Cowley, also known as (Mrs) Joy Coles, DCNZM, OBE, has been recognised once more for her work as a novelist, children's author and for her achievements in helping young people learn through reading.

Ronald McDonald House helps support Kiwi families through their children's medical journies. They provide over 5000 nights of accomodation to 500+ families.  To raise funds they've created this wonderful and personalised e-book. It is available to download from  savechristmas.org.nz or text XMAS to 4483 to make a $3 donation to Ronald McDonald House Charities.

From the 1930s - 1950s, a substantial number of Europeans arrived to our shores.  Refugees from Nazism, displaced post war people and escapees from communism arrived in New Zealand.  It's funny how we are now having a debate about immigration and the influences on our culture and economy.  It doesn't take much to cast our minds back a few years and remember the influences of this previous influx.  The positive and overwhelming enrichment that it produced.  Out arts, food, music and even architecture awn a great debt to the peppering of different cultures into the staid and stolid British cultural wasteland that out Colonial past had created.  Because among the new 'strangers' was an extraordinary group of artists and writers, photographers, and architects whose own modernism influences were to radically reshape the arts in this country and Australia.  Looking at stories of a wide range of artists from photographer Irene Koppel to writer Antigone Kefa...

Murder on Christmas Eve: Classic Mysteries for the Festive Season The opening story to this collection was a great start to a book.  Set in the days of Agatha Christie it provided a nice bit of Miss Marple-Englishness to kick it all off. This is a reprint, as they all are. And this particular story is set in a little country hamlet, with a stray cat that lives at the church, but patrols an old lady's house where he gets fed.  That is, until on Christmas Eve she gets killed and her handbag and jewelry stolen, the local police man, who could easily be played by John Nettles in the TV adaption - should that ever occur - starts his investigation, with the troublesome cat who seems to be following him around. The cat himself finds the old lady's bag, which he goes mad for. A day or two after a local boy finds one of the old lady’s earrings in his pocket, but the cat isn’t bothered he’s more interested in his girlfriend.  With this knowledge the police man takes...

A man coughs bloodied lung lining up into a toilet bowl. With an elegant, clipped accent and a very stiff lip, he asks if he should be concerned about “a spot of blood in my spittle”. You could only be in England, and so it very much turns out we are. It's 1947, Buckingham Palace, and King George VI, on the morning of his eldest daughter Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip Mountbatten has just discovered that he's dying. As soon as Phil the Greek (played by Matt Smith) has finished renouncing his nationality and titles, to be annoited Duke of Edinburgh, and general houseboy to the Queen (because he has no real power or reason to exisit in the British Royal Family), he and Elizabeth (Claire Foy) are wed. Foy’s performs Elizabeth Mountbatten as a ruthlessly un-showy woman, unwilling to bend to the male dominated stalwarts who hide behind of tradition and pomp to aspire their own goals and status.  She doesn't suffer these fools - or those of her own kin - lightly.  ...

Lincoln University is set to become the only university campus in the country without a bookshop. According to the Tertiary Education Union, the university has this week told staff its bookshop will close for good on 31 March, despite receiving more than 100 submissions and a petition with hundreds more calling for it to remain open.   “We haven’t been given any rationale other than there’s a squeeze on funding,” said union president Sandra Grey. “Over the past decade institutions are getting more students and less funding. Deep cuts happen as a result.” The Wireless has asked Lincoln University for comment, which is yet to publicly confirm the decision. Lincoln student president Danyon Thomas said the bookshop, which is open throughout the day, “has a huge convenience factor about it, especially with ours being quite a rural campus”. He concedes the changing nature of study means many students either don’t use books at all or buy them online. “But I’d eq...

Tis the season for putting your feet up, reading, grabbing a long tall drink, a handful of lollies and getting stuck into a good book. We here at the Groove Book Report celebrate children's fiction. So, here's a few suggestions for under the tree. I've added a recommended age and price (all but one are in in NZ$).  Most are available at all good book stores around the country and on line.   The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone  By Jaclyn Moriarty, Illustrated by Kelly Canby  (Allen & Unwin - Hardback - $24.99) Ages 8 - 12yrs Bronte Mettlestone's parents ran away to have adventures when she was a baby, leaving her to be raised by her Aunt Isabelle and the Butler. She's had a perfectly pleasant childhood of afternoon teas and riding lessons - and no adventures, thank you very much.  But Bronte's parents have left extremely detailed (and bossy) instructions for Bronte in their will. The instructions must be fo...

Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked the world, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious “alt-right” figures mystifies many. But the American extreme right has been growing steadily in number and influence since the 1990s with the rise of patriot militias. Following 9/11, conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black US president, militant racists have come out of the woodwork. Nurtured by a powerful right-wing media sector in radio, TV, and online, the far right, Tea Party movement conservatives, and Republican activists found common ground. Figures such as Stephen Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones, once rightly dismissed as cranks, now haunt the reports of mainstream journalism. Investigative reporter David Neiwert has been tracking extremists for more than two decades. In Alt-America, he provides a deeply researched and authoritative...

In Russian politics, Kompromat, literally "compromising material", is damaging information about a politician or other public figure used to create negative publicity, for blackmail, or for ensuring loyalty. Stanley Johnson's latest political thriller Kompromat claims to recount the story of the most audacious geo-political coup since Genghis Khan and his hordes swept across Asia into Europe. The UK Referendum in June 2016, on Britain's membership of the EU, was a political showdown a British prime minister thought couldn't be lost. But the next morning Britain woke up to a shock result. Mixing reality and hyper-reality, dabbling in 'fake news' and POTUS  conjecture Kompromat explores the deceit and conceit that might well have been occurring behind the scenes. This cynical but cheeky 'thriller' starts out as a bit of satire, quoting everything you may know about recent politics.  It reads like a very clever comedy sketch - like a ...

Christchurch-based writer James Norcliffe is to be the 2018 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellow. Norcliffe has published nine collections of poetry, a short story collection and ten novels for young people.  http://www.randellcottage.co.nz Christchurch-based writer James Norcliffe is to be the 2018 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellow. Norcliffe has published nine collections of poetry, a short story collection and ten novels for young people. As an editor he has had long involvement with the literary magazine, takahē and has edited anthologies of poetry and young people’s writing. He’s also served as an assessor for literary competitions and the New Zealand Society of Authors, and has received numerous awards and fellowships. Norcliffe’s Randell Cottage project is a novel with the working title The Frog Prince, a dual narrative with one strand set in early 19thcentury Westphalia, the other ...

Decades of hard work and pushing aside repeated rejections from publishers have finally paid off for expat writer Stephen Daisley, who this week won the fiction section of the Ockham NZ Book Awards , for Coming Rain . The award also means the former soldier, shearer and farmer takes home $50,000 courtesy of the inaugural Acorn Foundation Literary Award. The novel is a lyrically written but challenging tale of itinerant shearers in 1950s Australia. Along with Wellington writers, Catherine Robertson and Tracy Farr, Randell Cottage 2017 writer in residence, Stephen Daisley talked about his journey to writing and balancing his life.  He explored his dreams and his desires and the passion to write.  He also told of his passion for language and his ear for local dialects and phrasing. The Randell Cottage Creative NZ Writer in Residence is selected by a Trust-appointed committee to work on an approved project from July to December each year. The deadline for applications is in...

From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories ( Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars ) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him ( Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude ). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks...