THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Phew! We made it!  What a year it's been. The Groove Book Report will be taking a short break over the Xmas break to re-charge our batteries, put our feet up and nestle in with a good book.  It's a Kiwi summer, so we'll be out on the bike, in the kayak and behind the barbie, spending time with friends and whanau. We don't want to wax on about what an unprecedented year it's been.  We all know that.  We just want to take this time to thank all our loyal readers and publishers and guest writers for all their in put, their generosity and kindness supporting what we do.  We love books and writers  -that's at the heart of why we do this. So, thank you one and all. Meri Kerihimete from the Groove Book Report!

We continue our catch ups with a couple of eye-openers that loosely scout around the subject of the law and human rights.   Tree Of Strangers - Barbara Summer (Massey University Press $35.00)  ‘I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road.’ I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I’d never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing? Barbara Sumner is a New Zealand writer and film producer.  Tree of Strangers, her memoir of adoption, loss and discovery, will be published by Massey University Press in September 2020.   She co-founded the film production company Cloud South Films with her husband Tom Burstyn and has served as a writer for The New Zealand Herald. Sumner grew up in a family filled with secrets and lies. At twenty-three she decided she had to find her m...

Thanks to Covid and lock down many of the books requested for review were delayed.  Meaning, their delivery was held up and when they finally arrived we here at Groove Book Report were overwhelmed.  It's taken us a while to work through all these wonderful books.  So, before Christmas comes, we're putting as many short reviews and notices out there.  We recommend all of these for your Santa list.  First up: Poetry.  3 incredible volumes by upcoming poets that need to be heard.   Under Glass - Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press $24.99) A colossal jungle. Two suns. The sea on fire. If the mind were a place, what might it look like? Under Glass is an ambitious new collection by one of the most exciting young poets writing today. Gregory Kan’s second book is a dialogue between a series of prose poems, following a protagonist through a mysterious and threatening landscape, and a series of verse poems, driven by the speaker’s compulsive hunger to ma...

“I had so many flowers when I was little, I got to know them all so well that they are simply the breath of life to me. It’s no ordinary love; it’s a passion.” - Katherine Mansfield in a letter to Dorothy Brett, 26 January 1922 Last Saturday, at the Wellington Bridge club in Thorndon, compiler/Author Beverly Randell and Illustrator Jenni Shoesmith launched this fabulous new book.  Beverley Randell gave an illustrated talk, highlighting Mansfield's special literary relationship with flora and fauna.  This was followed by an afternoon tea and a visit to Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. 'Heart of Flame' reveals the exuberance and originality of Katherine Mansfield’s words, and Jenni Shoesmith’s lively and lifelike illustrations make it easy to identify the plants Mansfield loved so much. The talk will include readings from the book, compiled from Mansfield’s stories, poems and letters. Copies are available from Katherine Mansfield House:  https://www.katherinemansfiel...

For writer Jenny Robin Jones the United States has always been an enigma, a series of questionable notions formed through a lifetime. ‘What is America?’, she asks herself. Can she rely on her own personal impressions? In an interview, recorded at the National Library in Wellington the CoffeeBar Kid talks to Jenny about her book.   "Love America On the Trail of Writers & Artists in New Mexico by Jenny Robin Jones" is a New Zealander on a journey, from Wellington to the desert lands of Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico, following the paths of writers such as D H Lawrence, Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dorothy Brett, Ansel Adams, Dennis Hopper, and many others.    ‘All my life the idea of America had occupied a space in my psyche . . . I needed to see it. I needed to find a way to live with it and not despair. I needed to update my idea of America.’   Her journey takes her to the spectacular desert lands of Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico, where she...

The  Bibliotheca Alexandrina  (  الإسكندرية ‎  Maktabet al-Eskendereyya ) is a major library and on the shore of the Mediterranean in the city of Alexandria. It is both a commemoration of the original library,  that was lost in antiquity and a new champion of academic study, in recognition of the brilliance that this earlier center of study and erudition represented. The idea of reviving the old library dates back to 1974, when a committee set up by  Alexandria University  selected a plot of land for its new library. Construction work began in 1995 and, after some US$220 million had been spent, the complex was officially inaugurated on 16 October 2002. In 2010, the library received a donation of 500,000 books from the  Bibliothèque nationale de France  (BnF). The gift makes the Bibliotheca Alexandrina the sixth-largest French spoken library in the world. The library has shelf space fo...

Schrödinger's Books are accepting new children's books, or donatations when buying  Christmas books with them. Please be quick as the deadline to drop in a book is by December 14th. The Kiwi Christmas Books campaign, collects brand new children's books (baby to teen, fiction and non-fiction), which will be donated to Wellington City Mission and the Wellington Hospitals Foundation. You can drop your book at Schrödinger's Books, Jackson St, Petone.  www.schrodingersbooks.co.nz

Newly returned to Aotearoa New Zealand after four years teaching and writing in Edinburgh, Lynn Davidson is to be the 2021 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellow. Davidson will be using her time at Randell Cottage to write a memoir of her move to Scotland in 2016 and how, when prevented by Covid-19 from returning to New Zealand, she began exploring the life of her great aunt Vida. A poet and novelist. Davidson’s most recent publication is the poetry collection Islander . She won the Poetry New Zealand ’s 2020 poetry Award and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Massey University. Selection panel convener Stephen Stratford says, “We soon got it down to five applications to argue over, then four. And then there were three. A while later, there were two. This was a close-run thing, but Lynn Davidson’s project was in the end a unanimous choice. Everyone on the panel saw it is as a valuable contribution to New Zealand history and a project that, given the author’s track re...

When you are five, what matters most? Stability, new friends, fitting in at school, parents, love / amore? Maybe all of that.  Swedish author Rose Lagercratz and illustrator Eva Ericsson have been creating books for children for over 30 years. They know their readers well.   Lagercrantz has been writing since the 1970's, her first book was published in 1973.  She has since had her work translated into English, German, Korean, Japanese, Italian,Russian and Slovak.  She has received many of the top Swedish literary awards, including the August Prize and the Astrid Lindgren Prize. Eva Eriksson, is from Halmstad, Sweden.  She's illustrated several children's books for writers like Barbro Lindgren and Viveca Lärn.  Some of her illustrated books have also been translated into English.  She was educated at Konstfack University of Arts and Design, Stockholm and between 2003-2012 she held seat number 1 of the Swedish Acad...