Emily Davidow

On Monday, I visited the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington for a discussion on ‘first fictions’ with the writers of two of last year’s most highly praised debut novels here. Mary McCallum (The Blue ) and Susan Pearce (Acts of Love) explored the themes and process of creating their books with Kate Duignan, also a New Zealand novelist. They are all new to me, and I am intrigued to read The Blue, about life in an isolated whaling community on Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds in 1938.

Kate asked great questions, stimulating a lively discussion. One interesting commonality she brought up was that both authors created protagonists that live in small, isolated communities who start out feeling as if they had already failed in life. That resonated as a theme I see recurring in the way New Zealand describes itself in its own media.

Later that evening, McCallum won the Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction and the Readers’ Choice Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards for The Blue. Another prize-winner I’d like to check out is Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, a publication tracing the career of this contemporary painter whose exhibition of anthropomorphic birds in luminous palettes with the same name drew me back multiple times.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the NYT reviewed a new book about a Boston girl who married a Maori man, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story by Christina Thompson. Will have to download the first chapter and see what I think for myself. (By the way, the ability to freely download first chapters of books is one of my favorite features of the Kindle, which has become an invaluable essential for this traveler. If you want to keep reading, then you buy and immediately download the rest directly from the device.)