If you’re needing a good book to keep your mind occupied, don’t fret, we’ve got plenty. Get your hands on these 10 great books — that should keep you going until next time! If you’ve read a great book you’d like to provide a review for, email lara@janz.nz to find out how you can get your review online and start a bit of an informal book club.
Pilgrims by Matthew Kneale
The year is 1289. Pilgrims is a riveting, sweeping narrative that shows medieval society in a new light, as a highly rule-bound, legalistic world, though religious fervour and the threat of violence are never far below the surface. Told by multiple narrators, Pilgrims has much to say about Englishness, then and now.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Winner of the Booker Prize 2019. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
Agency by William Gibson
A thrilling dystopian novel imagining a world where Trump lost the election, from the master of science fiction. In an alternate time track, Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump's political ambitions were thwarted.
A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson
It’s 1960 and the world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.
Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez
Rainbow Milk is an intersectional coming-of-age story, following nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of a Jehovah's Witness upbringing and the legacies of the Windrush generation.
Aria by Nazanine Hozar
An extraordinary, cinematic saga of rags-to-riches-to-revolution that follows an orphan girl coming of age in Iran at a time of dramatic upheaval
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped.
The Dead Line by Holly Watt
A Bangladeshi camp. A British ambassador. A Harley Street doctor. Investigative journalist Casey Benedict is used to working on stories that will take her from the bottom to the top of society – stories with a huge human cost. And her latest case is no different. A frantic message is found hidden in clothes manufactured for the British high street. They take the girls…
Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
The heartrending story of a mid-century American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.