Small Island introduced me to the world of the Windrush generation, the Caribbean immigrants into Britain in the 1940s and subsequently. It detailed, in a sympathetic but unflinching way, the prejudices and difficulties faced by Black immigrants. Some of the characters were memorable, and the writing was original and emotional. The book was fully deserving of all the awards it received on publication.
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
This book won New Zealand's Ockham Award for best fiction of 2025. It is a sensitive portrait of a couple in their 70s as they prepare to downsize and move into a retirement home, all the time struggling with the death of their 11 year old son which happened decades earlier. Dementia, infirmity and regrets await us all, and the book studies these and other subjects in sympathetic detail
It's time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren't falling apart, but they're watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it's as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older…
This is a dystopian novel from New Zealand's leading novelist of recent years. Set in a version of Britain that presupposes that World War 2 ended in a treaty rather than victory by the Allies, with the government being repressive and having borrowed some genetic engineering techniques from Nazi Germany, the story (set in 1979) focusses on the lives of three boys aged about 12 (identical triplets) who are kept in a home under close medical and behavioural scrutiny. The pace picks up and by halfway through the book I was desperate to know what the boys' fate would be. The descriptions of English society in 1978 (Jim'll Fix It and Antiques Roadshow on TV, a female prime minister) are at times chilling, hilarious and subversive.
Ernest Hemingway wouldn’t approve of all the glowing adjectives, but there’s no denying that Hemingway’s Goblet is smart, witty and at times uproariously funny.
Dermot Ross has created a memorable and flawed lead character named Nick Harrieson, a divorced middle-aged law professor who is popular with students at his university in London but haplessly (and hopelessly) naive and noncommittal when it comes to his relationships with women. Nick doesn’t help himself when he allows himself to be drawn into an ill-advised relationship with one of his masters students, a Korean woman named Adrienne. Soon he finds himself the subject of a sexual harassment allegation.
Forced to take a one-month leave while the university investigates, he learns that his grandfather was in Pamplona in the 1920s, and in due course he finds out that the goblet sitting on his sister’s mantlepiece with a mysterious inscription was a gift from Hemingway to Grandpa Harrieson in 1925. Nick’s quest to learn more about his grandfather and the goblet leads to his joining forces with Adrienne as they uncover some unsavory revelations about the great author. Nick also is forced to confront a number of aspects about his own character and life.
This is much more than a novel. It takes readers on a wild ride from London to Auckland to Thailand to Hemingway’s Spain. Dermot Ross provides a gentle leg-pull on many of Hemingway’s renowned and toxic characteristics, but without disrespecting the quality of Hemingway’s writings. The portrait of the Nobel Prize winner that emerges is comical and at times scandalous.
The book is part mystery, part romance, part historical fiction, and all parts delightfully rollicking.
