THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

The Press archives up to 1995 will be digitised and made freely available for searching online under a landmark agreement with the National Library. The  library’s Papers Past website  already publishes editions of  The Press  from 1861 to 1945 which can be searched by words, phrases and dates. They are part of a substantial catalogue of 167 historic newspapers dating from 1839 to 1950, plus magazines, letters and Parliamentary papers. As Papers Past approached its 20th birthday he said the trickle of emails asking for more recent archive material had become “a torrent”. Digitisation of  The Press  up to 1995 would make newspaper coverage of national and international events post World War II readily accessible to the public. Topics from the Cold War through the cultural changes of the 1950’s and 60’s, the revival of te reo and te ao Māori in through to the Springbok tours and more would be searchable online. The Papers Past site had about 30 mi...

It has just been announced that Airini Beautrais, from Whanganui, has won the premier award at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards - the  Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction (which has a $57,000 prize).  er book of short stories, called  Bug Week  is her first book of  fiction writing.  It's the first time in over a decade that the category has been won by a collection of short stories.   The stories in Bug Week  roam from Aotearoa accross the globe to Europe, from the weird and grotesque to the sharply comical and pointedly feminist. Photo: Tracy Grant The convenor of judges Kiran Dass described Beautrais's book as a 'knockout from start to finish'.  "Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly-wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic." The awards also had a Gu...

A departure for the author's usually thriller, high tension YA style, to produce an engaging, historically accurate tale of a young girl, in the 1880s, who overcomes her own family's prejudices to become a nun at Sister Mary Joseph  Aubert's famous Whanganui convent.    From a very young age Molly Conway knew she wanted to be a nun.  The child of a devout Catholic mother.  The rest of the family are all Methodist and there is a heavy tension already. Becoming a nun is the wish of her dying mother.   The path is soon littered with with obstacles. Her father begins dropping hints that she should marry the local blacksmith’s son.  While Eddie is a best friend to Molly, she can't possibly marry him. First he's Methodist, and Molly is only 15.  Although marrying so young is common in those days, she feels uncomfortable and pressured.  Plus, she's already dedicated herself to becoming a nun.   It turns out that Molly's father re...