NZ fiction

Swimming in the Dark is the engaging new offering from Dunedin author Paddy Richardson.

Auckland student Ben Atkins wrote Drowning City as a teenager, and this, according to the advertising surrounding the book, is supposed to make the reader uphold his novel as something more than it is, most noticeably good.

Despite its near-contemporary setting and focus, Jenny Pattrick's latest novel, Heartland, revisits and magnifies themes familiar to readers of her historical novels: the complex relationships that run beneath the surface of small communities, the nature of family (both those that we are born into and those we choose ourselves), and the way in which the physical environment shapes individual and collective identity.

The long-awaited novel from Shonagh Koea is a pleasure in both presentation and text.

New Zealand author Charlotte Randall has created an extraordinary piece of fiction based on the early-19th century true story of four convicts who escaped on a sealing ship from jail on Norfolk Island, were dropped on one of the remote subantarctic Snares Islands for a year's sealing, and left there for almost a decade.

When people wake to a living nightmare, what will they do to survive?

Back in the early 1970s, Sydney was awash with dodgy politicians, corrupt cops, businessmen of dubious intent, and some plain and simple nasty blokes.

''It felt like a pivotal moment, best friends deciding whether to take the same life direction as their fathers,'' Alan Duff observes early in Frederick's Coat when Johno and his best mate Shane decide to start stealing from vehicles.

Eleanor Catton's second novel, The Luminaries has reached the Man-Booker short list and, despite mixed reviews, deserves the placing.

I meant to send this first novel back to the books editor, it seemed so obviously a ''woman's book''.

In selecting Jean Batten's story to tell, Fiona Kidman has chosen one of the most intriguing of heroines; and one whose life would appear to be full of contradictions.

Elizabeth Whitman, a nurse from New Zealand who has assisted wounded soldiers in England in World War 1, returns home to Mansfield (read Christchurch), gives birth to her son, and goes back to work, awaiting news of her husband missing in action in France.

Megan Sligo (GoGo to her friends) is a seamstress taking time out from her studies and enjoying Doing, not just Thinking. In her business she sees the seedier side of rips and tears, as her clients' clothes reveal all sorts of indiscretions.

Auckland author and daughter of an Italian father, Nicky Pellegrino has written a few books about the love of food and cooking, especially Italian food.

Only the Dead paints a decidedly seedy picture of crime and the Auckland underworld, and an extremely brutal one of its law enforcement officers.

James Cook still casts a long shadow over our lives. He has been depicted as everything from a founding father of Australasia to an insensitive agent of cultural or biological imperialism.

Rudy is 42 and his life is beginning to crumble.

The late Janet Frame's works are rewarding to read because they work on so many levels. On the most ''basic'' one, she simply writes a great story. Delving deeper, there is much more.

The United States weekly radio programme This American Life once featured a story about a man who recalled, as a boy, sending his estranged father cassette tapes on which he had recorded various life events, along with a request to reciprocate the gesture.