THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

  The 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist highlights 43 standout titles from 175 entries, including compelling memoirs, gripping novels, striking illustrated books, and thought-provoking poetry. Here's the Press Release: " Burning, bestselling and beautiful books nominated for 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Popular books that pack a punch and have hit the mark with readers across the motu in the past year have also found favour with the judges of the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, who reveal their longlists today. Unforgettable and amusing memoirs, novels that move and unnerve, illustrated books that powerfully illuminate the past and present, and sizzling, considered poetry collections are among the 43 books longlisted from 175 entries. Established authors dominate this year’s longlist; nine of the books nominated are by first-time published writers. They are represented by 19 publishers, from large multinational publishing houses to bijou presses. New Ze...

  With just six weeks to go until the big reveal of the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki line up, the AWF office is bustling. But happily over the summer the team found some downtime to escape into a few amazing books. And now back from the beach, they've rounded up their top reading picks to keep you inspired until the big programme launches in March.  So, here are the staff icks.  Go mad with your Xmas Book Vouchers!  Celia Bridge, Marketing & Development Coordinator:  • The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera  • A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez   Catriona Ferguson, Managing Director:   • Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin • All That We Know by Shilo Kino  • The Royal Free by Carl Shuker Lyndsey Fineran, Artistic Director:  • The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden • This Compulsion In Us by Tina Makereti • Playground by Richard Powers Kate Meere, Marketing & Development Manager:...

 And we continue our Summer Series with three absolute gems, all different but all worthy of a finger lick and a page lick or three.  The Lost Recipes -Australia's Culinary Gems Revived and ReImagined - Ross Dobson (Echo Publishing) “There is wonder,” writes Chef and cookbook author Ross Dobson, “to be had in discovering something.  Like a single journal never read or a hidden treasure never touched” “We found”, he continues, “a culinary oasis that was the beginning in the end of our ‘meat and two veg’ diet: a rival more exotic and delicious.”  Dobson used his hobby/obsession seeking out ‘forgotten’ recipes that are anything but boiled cabbage, overcooked mutton or bland mashed potatoes.  He mines old journals, books, newspapers in search of lost or neglected Aussie home cook recipes that span Victorian times to the 1950s.   Many oof these, as he points out with accompanying anecdotes and commentary were born of necessity or imported by immigrant famil...