THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Randell Cottage  2018 French resident, Amélie Lucas-Gary will be speaking at the National Library on Thursday, 7 June. Born in 1982, in Arcachon in France’s South West, she studied at the Sorbonne, graduating with degrees win cinema and history, and photography at the National School of Photography in Arles. Amélie Lucas-Gary comes to Wellington less than a year after the publication of her second novel, Vierge. French magazine Lire describes Vierge as “the story of a young woman who falls pregnant having never been with a man. As her unlikely virgin pregnancy begins, Emmanuelle, 16, decides to leave her hometown, Saint-Denis, to undertake a forced journey on the roads of France…" Her first novel, Grotte (Cave), published in 2014, is narrated by the guardian of the Lascaux caves. Isolated on the top of a small hill, between the cave and its replica, the narrator spins a story in which reality and fantasy meld and intertwine. Amélie and her family will be r...

In this book, Orhan Pamuk's 'Museum of Innocence' commemorates a vanishing vision of Istanbul. It is easy to be seduced by the imperial melancholy that a book like this promises.  Author and novelist Orphan Pamuk show us a world that is gone - perhaps for better and perhaps for worse. Pamuk was born in 1952, so he's likely to be old enough to remember if only from the second-hand accounts, stories and faded memories of his grandparents and their friends. They have furnished him with an insider's view of an Ottoman Turkey that is of not so much a setting sun but ore an eclipse.  Remember that only 30 years before Pamuk's birth the country, if that was what it was, was in the grips of a world war fighting for its existence, even at a time when much of the upcoming proletariat were feeling more and more uneasy about the kingdom they were defending. The bi-plane on the cove gives you a quick glimpse of a city in transition between the ancient Byzantine and...

Pip Adam wins premier book awards’ $50,000 prize A novel which judges say ‘will bring readers back from the dead’ has won the 2018 $50,000 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in the country’s premier book awards. Wellington writer Pip Adam received the honour for her novel The New Animals (Victoria University Press) at the glittering Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony which also celebrated the Awards’ 50 th anniversary, held in Auckland’s Aotea Centre tonight. The New Animals , which parodies the Auckland fashion scene, was praised by the category judges as a confrontational, revelatory novel that holds a mirror up to contemporary New Zealand culture. They said: “The New Animals handles a large ensemble of unrooted characters with skill. It’s stylistically raw and reveals a good deal in a modest way. The New Animals is so vivid in imagery and imagination that the judges haven’t stopped thinking about it since. In this category in 2018 it’s the book with the mos...

A Wellington author has won the country's premier literature prize. Pip Adam won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for her 2017 novel The New Animals at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards held on Tuesday night in Auckland. The prize includes $50,000 cash and has been previously won by Catherine Chidgey, Eleanor Catton, Emily Perkins, Charlotte Grimshaw and Lloyd Jones. The novel, which last year received a mixed critical response, is Adam's second. Her first, I'm Working on a Building, was published in 2013, also by Victoria University Press. Adam, who has a PhD in creative writing from Victoria University, also reviews books for the Listener and RNZ. She lectures on fiction and creative-nonfiction at Massey University, and teaches at Arohata and Rimutaka Prisons. She is the host of the Better off Read podcast. Go to  http://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/