The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone
Gareth Ward & Louise Ward
Penguin, $34.99

Real-life booksellers and former coppers living across the ditch, Louise and Gareth Ward have penned the first in a “cosy crime” series. It features their alter-egos, bookshop proprietors Garth and Eloise (and their dog Stevie, also drawn from life) who are also, like the authors, former police officers from England who relocated to Aotearoa/New Zealand. The small-town mystery is a missing person cold case sparked by the long arm of a criminal imprisoned across the sea, with a celebrity book launch and a travelling circus adding to the quirk and colour of the tale. It’s a well-constructed mystery, with a splash of literary eccentricity, but it’s the droll rapport between the detective partners, their perspectives narrated in alternating chapters, that makes this an engaging first foray into comic crime.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
We Are The Stars
Gina Chick
Summit Books, $29.99

Gina Chick never knew her grandmother, the renowned author Charmian Clift, but she shares her gift as a writer and her deep connection with the natural world. Most people will know of Chick as the winner of the first season of the survivalist series Alone Australia. This memoir is about everything that came before, everything that made her “a wild thing in a tame skin, restless between worlds”. It tells of a life lived with such intensity, awareness and determination to swallow experience whole – from the unbearable grief of losing her three-year-old daughter to the ecstatic wonder of finding herself inseparable from the cosmos – that it is impossible to do justice to it here. Suffice to say, We Are The Stars is one of those rare books that goes to the quick of existence on almost every page. It is raw, lyrical, passionate and wise and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Profiles in Hope
John Brogden
Hachette, $34.99

Davina Smith had fled her house, intending to kill herself when a wave of nausea reminded her of the child she was carrying. She called Lifeline and was brought back from the brink. She named her child Hope. Even though he was paralysed by his suicide attempt, Matthew Caruana found the will to live after a blunt conversation with a stranger on a train who “gave me a gift I never knew I needed”. While the stories told by the suicide survivors in this book are inescapably confronting, they trace a rocky yet upward trajectory from hopelessness to gratitude for being alive, a recurring theme being that the world is not better off without you. Interviewer John Brogden knows that path himself and deftly probes his subjects for their insights into what hitting rock bottom taught them, how they navigated their way back and how they have used the experience to help others.

Want
Edited by Gillian Anderson
Bloomsbury, $34.99

Want is the blunt title, but what this collection of poetic, vulnerable, unruly female fantasies lays bare is something more complex: a deep, fraught undercurrent of yearning beneath the public face women present to the world. For some of the authors of these anonymous letters, fantasy is what they really long for in their lives. Tenderness, physical intimacy, love, to be seen and accepted for who they are. For others, fantasy runs counter to their intellect, to their principles, to “everything I believe in and stand for”. Such fantasies are a release from reality. A form of escape, of liberation, of abandonment of responsibility and identity. And then there is everything in-between, from asexual fantasies that always involve fictional characters but never the women themselves, to the erotic appeal of the forbidden and unattainable: “an entire Shakespearean love story told in lingering glances”.

Good Nature
Kathy Willis
Bloomsbury, $34.99

There is much that is laudable in this book about how scientists are finding physiological reasons why being exposed to nature is good for our health, especially if it encourages people to seek out green spaces, and changes the way we design our urban environments. But the idea that nature is simply landscape “out there” that we can take a dose of like medicine would be funny if it weren’t so sad. We might have imprisoned ourselves in concrete and stone and called it civilisation, but we are still inextricable from nature. Scientific papers on the positive way our eyes respond to green or how students do better in a classroom with a view are ‘proving’ the obvious. As I read this book, I longed for a more holistic, less mechanistic investigation of our atavistic need for the wildness that shaped us and the harmful consequences of regarding nature as “other”.

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