Top 20 Reads for 2023 - Whoopee!!!

 

Nothing like a few exclamation marks to get the party started!  I have read some mighty books this year and praise our wonderful library and Community Centre - Te Takeretanga-o-Kurahaupo for the great reading choices they make for us all. 

There’s something for everyone here and, because my cat is trying to walk all over the keyboard, I’ll get right on it – the list, I mean, not the cat!

The Axeman’s Carnival,  Catherine Chidgey

Less is Lost, Andrew Sean Greer

Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng

Playing Under the Piano, Hugh Bonneville  (Memoir)

The Light in Hidden Places, Sharon Cameron (Young Adults)

Day’s End, Gary Disher

Scythe, Neal Shusterman (Young Adults)

Mrs Jewel and the wreck of the General Grant, Cristina Sanders

Like a Sister,  Kellye Garrett

My Darkest Prayer, S. A. Cosby

Duffy and Son, Damien Owens

Small Mercies, Dennis Lehane

The Sparrow,  Tessa Duder

Kala, Colin Walsh

The Great Swindle, Pierre LeMaitre

All Human Wisdom, Pierre LeMaitre

Night will Find You, Julia Heaberlin

Did I Ever Tell You This?, Sam Neill (Memoir)                     

A Better Place, Stephen Daisley

The Last Devil to Die, Richard Osman

The Bone Tree, Airana Ngarewa

What am I doing?? That’s 21, not 20!! Never mind, they are all fabulous reads and this list is a loving tribute to storytellers everywhere who work so hard to entertain and inspire us. 

Have the happiest and safest New Year that you can, and let us still believe in the old adage of Peace and Goodwill to All of us, Everywhere. 

Love and best wishes for 2024 from the staff, Friends of the Library and Volunteers of Te Takeretanga-o-Kurahaupo.

 

The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman.

           

      
      Who by now surely needs no introduction:  his familiar and much-loved characters from his first three books about the elderly sleuths of a British retirement village have been smash hits, not least because he ably demonstrates that old people, particularly his main characters, can still run rings (metaphorically) around those much younger.  (Chronically!)

            The members of the Thursday Murder Club are grappling with the news that one of their friends, antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma, has been murdered after receiving a terracotta box containing heroin worth a hundred thousand pounds – then attempting to sell it on himself.  Hard for the friends to believe, but that’s where all the evidence points. 

            Naturally, the Club members are not privy to gathered police evidence – except for the efforts of Constable Donna and her boss Chris, who are miffed because the National Crime Agency have been mysteriously alerted and are now running the investigation, including taking over Chris’s office, AND the Senior Officer has made herself as unpleasant as possible, seconding them to horse thefts.  No wonder there is mutiny in the ranks!  Which means that the friends know as much (or more) than the official investigators.

            Needless to say, the dealers who were waiting for the heroin also do their best to find the missing powder, and people start to die – Bad Buggers mainly, but the body count is rising and the mystery remains as to who will survive – and do they deserve to?

            Richard Osman’s wonderful characters remain the same, reliable and true to each other and themselves, but behind the humour and still-enviable zest for life lies the spectre of aged vulnerability – that which every old person fears:  the terrifying loss of self, dementia.  Ex-spy Elizabeth has to face daily the gradual and obvious mental deterioration of her beloved husband Stephen and, whilst he is still capable of making giant decisions, they must decide between them what, when, and where to finish their long and beloved union.  I defy even the most stoutly unemotional reader not to be moved by Elizabeth’s predicament; it happens to so many thousands of couples and Richard Osman writes with great empathy and poignancy on behalf of them all:  thank you, Mr Osman, for writing of old age with such humour and grace - my only worry being that he says he’s going to give the Thursday Murder Club a rest for a little while as he concentrates on a new series:  well, all I can say is that Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron or Ibrahim better not have popped their clogs in the meantime!  FIVE STARS.      

              

 

The Bone Tree, by Airana Ngarewa.

 

            I was glad to finish this book.  Not because it was a rubbish read, poorly written – just the opposite:  it is a towering, brutal story of the sadness and violence endured by children of poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand;  the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness engendered by their terrible vulnerability – and the remedies some of them will employ in order to survive. 

            This is NOT an easy read for any New Zealand European as it delves mercilessly into our doubtful colonial history, different versions of which have been taught in schools for more than a century;  only in the last decades has the Maori language been recognised as the second official language of our country, and Te Reo is now being used extensively in everyday speech, to the joy of Tangata Whenua:  the language is alive and well!

            Sadly, teenager Kauri (or Cody, as his Irish dad and the welfare organisation reps call him) knows his father will not live much longer;  Kauri nurses him faithfully but doesn’t actually care if he dies;  he has been the victim of many vicious beatings when his dad came home drunk and raging against Kauri’s Maori mother ‘who woke up dead one day’ from a wrongly diagnosed illness.  Nah, good riddance to the old bastard - even though Kauri looks after him to the best of his ability, he certainly won’t be missing him.

            But Kauri’s main worry is his little brother Black – who is anything but, being as pale as milk and a stranger to schooling of any kind, making him a perfect target for the pakeha welfare guys who have been sniffing around too much lately;  Kauri has seen what happens to kids who get ‘uplifted’ by the Welfare – they turn out broken, and he can’t have that for his beloved little bro.  When the old man dies, Kauri will go on a quest to find his relatives –there must be some family left out there who will help them find their place in life, their ancestry, their place of belonging, their turangawaewae.

            And Kauri’s search leads him to the nearest city, and family to which he would never have dreamed of associating – a whole church full of them, not to mention a fallen sinner who introduced Kauri to all these Holier-than-Thous – every one of them pious to a fault, but never acknowledging their family connections.  In his efforts to find his family, Kauri also learns some very big life lessons about those who want to be found, and those who don’t.

            It was hard going reading this story.  It made me deeply ashamed of our country’s bloody history and the glossing-over of terrible mistakes made by the early colonial powers that are now finally being acknowledged.  Thank you, Airana Ngarewa, for this great and timely story.  SIX STARS. 

                 

 

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley.

 

            This is the third of Stephen Daisley’s novels that I have read and once again, I am in awe of his seemingly effortless talent to evoke myriad emotions from the reader as they journey through his characters’ lives, completely involved and living each experience, good or bad, with them – and there are so many searing, tragic experiences, for Stephen Daisley writes about war, and he doesn’t pretty it up for the reader:  in spare, short sentences he tells the story of twin brothers from New Plymouth in New Zealand’s North Island who, at the age of twenty enlist in the Army at the beginning of the Second World War.

            Roy and Tony Mitchell are jacks-of-all-trades.  They are identical twins, but Tony is an idealist and artistic.  Roy is relentlessly practical:  what you see is what you get.

They have had a rough start to life:  their father was given land by the government when he came back from the First World War but he also came back broken and turned to the drink.  Their mother left them to fend for themselves without a backward glance when they were fourteen.  She’d had enough.  After working for keep and learning stock handling, fencing and all the other backbreaking toil associated with hard-scrabble farming, the twins decide it’s time for a change:  might as well go to war!

            So they do, and end up at Maleme on the island of Crete with their Battalion, retreating from a huge German Offensive in which Tony the Introvert is believed lost.  Bloody good Joker Roy is understandably shattered, but he feels even worse because he ran away like a coward, leaving his brother behind, and when he returned, could only find Tony’s leg, shattered and shredded at the listening post where he left him.

            The fate of both brothers is masterfully revealed;  Roy is shipped to Italy with his regiment, and Tony becomes a Prisoner of War.  He is shown  compassion by his captors, while Roy sees the worst side of the enemy:  a whole village annihilated as the Allied troops came to liberate them:  the feelings of the hapless reader (me!) are trampled into the ground;  this is how it was, and this powerful, terrible story should – but won’t – act as a terrible, sickening example of what war does to the world, how long it takes for nations to recover, and the tragic fact, as evidenced by the Ukraine and Gaza, that nobody learns War’s lessons.  SIX STARS.    

 

Killing Moon, by Jo Nesbo.

 

            Harry Hole.  Ah, Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo’s brilliant alcoholic Norwegian detective, adept at solving the heinous crimes of serial-killers, but just about done-for by the time this story starts.  Harry is in Los Angeles, determined to drink himself to death or, when his money runs out, to finish everything off by his own hand – and gun.  To join his beloved Rakel, cruelly murdered by a friend who wanted the ultimate revenge – but fate (or karma) has other plans for Harry:  he rescues an elderly lady from death by her creditors, but there’s a time limit on their generosity:  he has a week to find nearly a million dollars, or Lucille, whose kindness to Harry has been legendary, gets a bullet.

     Coincidentally, he receives a call from Oslo with a job offer:  working as a private detective to prove the innocence of a multi-millionaire who is facing murder charges after the bodies of two young women were found within a week of each other, the second one beheaded.  Suspicion has fallen on the millionaire because they were both guests at a lavish cocaine-addled party he threw in his penthouse on the night the first girl died and despite the fact that his wife provides an alibi for him, there is evidence that this is not the case. 

It is no easy thing to return to Oslo with all its wonderful and terrible memories – and all the familiar drinking holes, not to mention all the colourful characters from Harry’s past, including his former police colleagues, some of whom are less than pleased to see him, but Harry is on a time limit and time is of the essence:  he knows that Markus Røed is probably innocent of the crimes with which he is charged, but he’s guilty of crimes just as destructive and believes that power and money can buy anything, including Harry Hole, who is singularly unimpressed:  just tell him the truth and show him the money.

But Markus has rampaged through his life without a thought for the people he crushed under his hand-made shoes on the way – until one of them decides to strike back, and fashions a revenge that is truly Biblical. 

And I, who pride myself on guessing whodunit from early on in the piece, was  truly tricked into thinking it was someone else entirely – I could have taken my pick of all the red herrings on offer and still came up crook, so Jo Nesbo has done it again:  given us a truly thrilling page-turner, with wonderful supporting characters and a protagonist who has endeared himself permanently to every reader to the extent that there would be an international outcry if Harry Hole did indeed decide to end it all.  SIX STARS.   

 

Did I Ever Tell You This?  By Sam Neill.                               Memoir.

 

            New Zealand actor Sam Neill tells the reader more than once in his graceful and hugely entertaining memoir that he is ‘a jobbing actor’:  he will say that he does it to feed himself and his family, about whom he is always loving and touchingly proud.  It soon becomes obvious to the reader, however, that while he has more than earned enough to put food on the table for family generations to come, he has also gained a world-wide reputation as a celebrated actor in a myriad different roles, from battling dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies to dazzling 17^th century London as King Charles the Second.

            And he is also battling cancer.

            About which he writes baldly and bravely, with no trace of the ‘Poor-Me’s’, an indication of his upbringing in a loving but no-nonsense family.  Sam, baptised Nigel to his eternal regret after his birth in Ireland, was the second son of a New Zealand military officer  (‘your father,’ says an aunt in pointed reference to Sam. ‘Now he was a handsome man.’)  As proven by an absolutely stunning photo of Sam’s dad.  Sam’s mum was an equally photogenic young Englishwoman and, after producing daughter Juliet, the family eventually moved to Dunedin after a wonderful, wild start in Ireland, and Sam was despatched to the delights of boarding school in Christchurch.  Whether he wanted to go or not – ‘nothing wrong with a Boarding-School education, it’ll do you good!’ Or not.  As Sam was more academically inclined than sporty (he loved acting, surprise surprise!) he wasn’t regarded with great interest by his teachers. But.

            Fate intervenes, when after university Sam gets a job with the National Film Unit (‘New Zealand’s least cool film makers’) and he is eventually cast in ‘Sleeping Dogs’, a pioneering feature movie that interested people in Australia, and  was the start of His Brilliant Career.  Sam and the camera fell in love and have been thicker than thieves ever since.  Only his family is more well-loved than acting – and wine-making:  thanks to his superior ‘jobbing’ talents, Sam is also a vintner of some note – the Pinot Noir produced at Sam’s South Island Two Paddocks vineyard has an international reputation:  not bad for a weedy little kid called Nigel – who changed his name to Sam when he was small because all the best guys in cowboy movies were called Sam.

            The last word shall go to Sam’s little daughter Elena who visited him in his trailer when he was upholstered magnificently in his royal raiment as King Charles the Second:  Sam was waiting for her cries of admiration but all Elena could say was ‘but Daddy, where are the Dinosaurs?’ This was the perfect way to end a lovely book written by a gentleman, and a gentle man.  SIX STARS.       

 

Night Will Find You, by Julia Heaberlin.

 

          Vivvy Bouchet has had a number of disadvantages in her life as she grew up, not least being the daughter of a Psychic who gives readings true and false in an effort to support Vivvy and her elder sister Brigid;  they sometimes have to leave town in a hurry – especially when the body of a dead woman is exhumed in their back yard which their Mum claims to have foreseen:  this event signifies a big increase in income, but removes permanently any privacy they had growing up.  A shift to the Lone Star State of Texas, proud home of myriad conspiracy theorists and gun-toting Trumpsters is not the safe haven it could have been, and reaching adulthood for both girls is something of a triumph – especially as Vivvy has managed to achieve her childhood goal of becoming a respected scientist – an astrophysicist, no less, the pride of her small family.  There’s just a couple of things wrong with that rosy picture:  Vivvy is obsessive-compulsive, and she has inherited her mother’s doubtful gift of second sight.

            A very odd combination of a relentlessly factual scientific mind married to an equally unassailable group of ‘feelings’.  For that reason Vivvy works alone on her exploratory Space studies, supported by a prestigious university grant – until her brother-in-law Mike, a detective, asks for her psychic help with a group of photos he wants her to see:  could any of the subjects be still alive?  If they are dead, any vibes as to where their bodies are?

            Well.  Mike must be desperate if he is asking for her help, but he can’t ask his mother-in-law – she has recently died of natural causes, so Vivvy is the next-best thing.  And she proves her worth:  a three-year old girl who disappeared from her home eleven years ago is not dead, despite her mother being jailed for her ‘murder’.  She’s alive – but where?

            Julia Heaberlin has written a marvellous thriller – not just superior plotting and characters, but her ruthless honesty in depicting today’s America, that land of endless opportunity bogged down with misinformation, disinformation, climate deniers, and the podcasters and newscasters frothing at the mouth to spread more fantasies to people who want to believe – need to believe – in something, the more unbelievable, the better.  Through her heroic character Vivvy she lays bare illnesses that infect a proud country, in the meantime giving us, in the best thriller tradition, shock after shock as exposes bad guys we never suspected, and a glimpse of a MAGA world we’d rather not see. SIX STARS.