What a books judge is reading over rainy weekends

Stephanie Jones is one of the judges of the NZ Booklovers Awards 2023.

For a reader there are never enough hours, and people get annoyed when you bring a book to the dinner table. But one of the few gifts of this horrifying summer has been unexpected downtime, during which I read several stunners, some shortlisted in this year’s NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction Book.

I don’t see the inimitable Paddy Richardson’s name floated in conversations about Aotearoa’s best contemporary novelists, but it should be. For my money she is one of our most accomplished, dare I say important, authors, and her work only gets better. Richardson’s glorious, devastating WWI-era By the Green of the Spring revisits the awful history of Somes Island and adds a new facet to the special interest she seems to have in the German experience; Swimming in the Dark, one of the superb psychological thrillers she published in the 2010s, travelled from New Zealand to Stasi Germany.

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* What I’m Reading: Dame Fiona Kidman
* How I write: Brigid Feehan, fiction writer for young adults
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Simon Lendrum’s smashing debut crime novel The Slow Roll surprised and delighted at every turn. Lots of fiction in which bad things happen is dark as hell, but Lendrum seems to think we deserve some fun, and though dry and a little melancholy in tone, this novel lingers in my memory as a narratively dexterous thrill ride, with excellent action set pieces and high stakes, a lightly tormented investigator-hero, and acidic droplets of social commentary that embed the events of the story in the right-now.

Two other stand-outs: James Norcliffe’s The Frog Prince, a clever reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm, and Fiona Sussman’s The Doctor’s Wife with its dark twisty plot.

On the next rainy weekend – shouldn’t be long – I’ll be savouring a new treat from Mount Eden’s indie treasure Time Out bookstore: Barbara Kingsolver’s 550-page Dickens reimagining Demon Copperhead, recommended by my mother, who passed on to me her obsession with books.