Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Richard Shaw has struck a rich vein. His books The Forgotten Coast (2021) and The Unsettled (2024) both grappled with his immigrant family history in the nineteenth century, extrapolating to New Zealand history generally, with a focus on the appalling wrongs done to Māori. The Unsettled was inspired in part by the responses he recei...

Siobhan Harvey’s memoir begins, tellingly, with a gap. When she was eighteen months old – according to her mother’s retelling – Harvey was left alone in her mother’s bedroom. Later, the mother found the toddler unconscious, an empty pill bottle in her hand. ‘It was your fault, as usual,’ the mother frames this story of the overdose, which could have ended in ...

Lauren Keenan’s new novel spans 1790s Ireland, New South Wales and Ngāmotu/New Plymouth on the brink of the New Zealand wars and the decades after. Although not an official prequel, The Other Catherine is closely related to Keenan’s last book, The Space Between. In the new novel we follow the story of Keita – the aunt of Matāria, one of the ...

In 1834, the British Empire began the controversial practice of relocating thousands of people from India to work in the agricultural fields of various British territories. The people who signed up called themselves Girmitiya – the people of the agreement. The scheme seemed sensible on paper: the recruitment was to be voluntary; the workers were to get free p...