THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Verb Wellington is thrilled to release our magical 2021 Verb Readers & Writers Festival programme.  There are many highlights including  Hinemoa Elder ,  Rebecca Mafie on Helen Kelly , the return of   Feminist Rage Night ,  Charlotte Grimshaw  on her astounding memoir  The Mirror Book , the   eighth annual LitCrawl  and so much more. Here are some key links to help you navigate the programme: Festival introduction page Festival e-book  Festival online programme LitCrawl Wellington 2021 Here are some programme highlights we think you'll love! Verb Poetry Showcase: A Summoning  Wednesday 3 Nov @ Meow, 9 Edward St. We've summoned some of the freshest and most exciting voices in Aotearoa's poetry realm to come together to share their most magical works.  Read more online here. Doireann Ní Ghríofa: A Ghost in the Throat @ Saturday 6 Nov. National Library Some of you may remember Doireann's spectacular appearances at Verb 20...

From one of Aotearoa's best known pathologiests comes a new book about the unlikely, the extraordinary and tragic ways humans meet their timely and untimely ends.  This is the second book by Temple-Camp (his first being 'The Cause of Death: Trues Stories of Death And Murder From A New Zealand Pathologist'). 'It's Sheer chance of living or dying that fascinates me... we really have little control over what it will be.' Cynric Temple-Camp  A dead body without a trace of trauma; alien parasites; worms of the brain; crocodile attacks and bizarre eating disorders ... 'In The Quick and the Dead', pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp takes readers into a world of disease and death as he seeks answers for those who were unlucky, and those still alive to tell the tale.  This is a book we were sent last year. Lockdown #2 has given us a chance to catch up on our reading.  And so, we settled down one day to take a deep dive into the fscinating world of Dr Cynric Templ...

With the country back to L3 and L2 Lockdown all our favorite independent bookshops are back online.  So, get back out there and support them! Advice for booksellers during Covid

We don't normally forward on articles from other sources but this one was too good to pass up. It seems, according to the Spinoff, that Scotland have taken possession of one of our greatest literary icons: Hairy Mclary! And it's not just online. It's an  official Government sponsored takeover..."They’re roping poor Hairy into special Scottish theme days at schools and daycares, too. Proclaims a primary school on the outskirts of Edinburgh". Shock and horror. Does author Lynley Dodd know?   Apparently, yes.  Read the full story here : 

Monsters aren’t real – or are they? We don’t think about them much, not until they attack, that is.  Jessie had a safe and secure life, but out of the blue her world was ravaged by the most ominous of creatures, Whisper. With his horde of followers, he finds a way out of The Badlands and invades her world.  Jessie’s anxiety is overwhelming, but help comes in unexpected ways from the strangest of places and people.  This is a story for young people who are weighed down by feelings of anxiety and depression. It helps them realise that how they feel is not unusual, and that with self-awareness and empathetic help they can find a way through.  This book offers parents a framework to subtly approach anxiety.  Our tamariki are going through a time of constant change and uncertainty.  Any opportunity to drop this in, with the feather touch of an idea, is welcome.   I read this with my youngest and she was the one who realised what the story was about....

It's 54 years since Alan Preston opened the legendary Wellington independent in Willis Street - Unity Books.   When Alan Preston kicked off Unity Books in 1967, the shop was tiny and cerebral and only whimsically-commercial, a wedge within the OUP showrooms. Expanding 5 years later into the 2nd of 4 eventual locations on Willis Street, Alan started the pattern of hiring hugely talented & charismatic bookselling staff (including many writers and musicians). Unity Books, always talkative anyway, also began to party. And to augment the exciting bursts of local publishing (and the non-stodgy titles from antipodean distributors) Unity Books began to direct import stock - books that nobody else had. So the shop stood out as something vigorous and radical, even though, as Nigel Cox said in his eulogy for Alan in 2004, Alan still wore his "trouser-coloured-trousers". And so, due to the reliability of two kinds of daily traffic - the extraor...