
A small selection of some of the books I loved this year. Forgive me that there are no New Zealand books on this list. I’ve done my service this year of reading/reviewing/programming New Zealand writers into a festival/and reading and judging 43 New Zealand titles for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Books Awards. I can’t talk about those Ockhams books yet!
August Blue
Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)
Before the Russian composer and virtuoso pianist Rachmaninov composed his iconic ‘Piano Concerto No. 2’, he was gripped by a heavy depression. He credited the lifting of this ennui to treatment by hypnosis which breathed creative fire back into him, enabling to craft the haunting work. In Deborah Levy’s hypnotic eighth novel August Blue, central character Elsa M. Anderson (the ‘M’ stands for Miracle) is a renowned concert pianist, a former child prodigy whose hands are insured in America for millions of dollars. In a humiliating aberration, she loses her place while performing Rachmaninov’s piece in Vienna and walks off-stage and away from performing music.
A common theme in Levy’s work is shapeshifting dualities and spectres, and August Blue is no different. While at a flea market in Athens, Elsa sees a woman who is wearing the same green raincoat as her. She watches the woman buy a pair of mechanical horses which dance when the tail is lifted. Elsa wants those horses and decides that the woman is her psychic doppelganger. “My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was.” Elsa follows her - or is followed by her - from Athens to London and Paris. “I heard her voice as music, a mood, or sometimes as a combination of two chords.”
In many of her books, it is customary for Levy to place her characters in settings outside of the UK, away from home, outside of their comfort zones. Her best two novels Hot Milk (2016) take place in Almeria on the Spanish coast, and Swimming Home (2011) is set in Nice. Adopted by music school svengali Arthur Goldstein when she was a child, Elsa doesn’t know her birth parents. She is displaced.
August Blue references the pandemic in an effective way to heighten the disconnect between characters. When Elsa is giving piano lessons to young students, the ubiquitous surgical blue masks make communication difficult. Levy captures a low-level panic and hyper-alertness, minor characters we meet in August Blue are somewhat frenzied from being in lockdown.
Whether she is writing memoir or fiction, Levy is an exquisite writer of stylish mood pieces. She is a rare contemporary writer in that she has an avant garde background (in theatre) and her themes and writing style embrace psychoanalytic theory (Freud is referenced in August Blue which is concerned with the subconscious mind and repressed memory), the experimental, and bracingly intellectual, and yet at the core, she so expertly and generously examines and reveals the lived female experience in a way that is sharply relatable with a popular appeal. Her languid books are strangely but perfectly pitched somewhere between being cerebral yet also high-end holiday reads.
Levy is informed by a sophisticated European sensibility which her books constantly reference either directly or thematically. Striking Godard film stills adorn the covers of her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy, and fine filmmakers Fassbinder, Dreyer and Bergman pop up in August Blue which opens with a quote from the late Belgian filmmaker (and director of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles which was voted the greatest film of all time in a 2022 critics’ poll published by Sight and Sound) Chantal Akerman’s melancholy memoir My Mother Laughs: “Even our shadows are in love when we walk.” August Blue taps into eerie dualities and doppelgangers in cinema like Hitchock’s Vertigo and Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé. The latter is named after a luridly hued cocktail. Elsa too drinks weird, verdant cocktails.
August Blue evokes the same mesmerising style and atmosphere of Levy’s best two novels, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The cyclical use of recurring motifs, her eye for the uncanny and ear for dryly funny observations here are exhilarating, as always, to read.
*Originally published in NZ Listener
Kick the Latch
Kathryn Scanlan (Daunt)
I was never a horsey kid or interested in horse-related books. But Kick the Latch was a delightful surprise read of the year. It’s astonishing how much life is compressed into this remarkable, slim book which has an inventive approach to form and storytelling. I found it completely fascinating and absorbing from start to finish. It’s a novel, but it’s based on hours of transcriptions from conversations and interviews Kathryn Scanlan had with a horse trainer named Sonia. Charting Sonia’s life over decades, Scanlan is telling someone else’s story via interviews in a novelistic form. Kick the Latch, by the way, refers to what is done to open the starting gate in a horse race. But you probably already knew that.
The two meet each other after Scanlan’s parents met Sonia at an antique fair, and after chatting to Sonia and hearing her stories, Scanlan’s mother calls her to tell her she’d find Sonia interesting. So they meet up. And she records and transcribes hours and hours of Sonia sharing her life story.
Sonia is a compelling woman and character. She was born with a dislocated hip in the Midwest in 1962. The doctors thought she’d never walk. As a child, her uncle tells her that he knows a man getting rid of a Shetland pony which turns out to be a stallion. But she soon develops a beautiful and dedicated commitment to horses.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman devoted to horses and the strange encounters and people she has met along the way. We follow the experiences of her life on various race tracks as she develops her career as a horse trainer. I think she did everything other than ride the horses.
For such a short book, Kick the Latch is a very generous book. We are invited into this world which Sonia describes with a kind of bluntness the harsh realities and brutalities, particularly in regard to the horses - these majestic animals - but her care, respect and devotion to the horses is apparent. Sonia herself has had a harsh life and there is a lot of male violence here. An interesting thing happens when aged 41-years-old after leaving an abusive relationship Sonia decides to study law enforcement part time while working full time in a factory so she can get inside the heads of criminals. She then goes to work in a prison and has this fantasy that her missing abusive ex-partner will show up there one day. She says:
“Maybe one day, this sucker will walk through the prison doors, and there I’ll be. I’ll say, ‘what took you so long?’”
Kick the Latch is a beautiful example of concision (also seen in her excellent, unsettling collection of short stories The Dominant Animal), a life story refined right down to around 160 pages over a few dozen chapters which are super tight - each chapter is around one to three pages long, it’s very deliberate which I guess is why it’s been compared to the great writer Lydia Davis, who we all love. Davis herself says of Kick the Latch: “Kathryn Scanlan has performed a magical act of empathetic ventriloquy… This immediate, engrossing immersion in another life and world, so personally and passionately told, is compulsively readable.”
I loved the insight into this world. Kick the Latch can be brutal, but is sensitively handled. At one point, Sonia says, “Priests came down on race days to bless the horses legs before they ran. But there’d be plenty of times it didn’t work.”
I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records
Audrey Golden (White Rabbit Books)
The story of monolithic post-punk label Factory Records “the beating heart of Manchester” has been well-mined and documented via books in the form of memoir, biography and historical narratives as well as in the films 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Control (2007). All of the members of New Order apart from Gillian Gilbert have written books about their lives in music. Most of them have written more than one, actually. Everybody knows and recognises the names Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Martin Hannett and Peter Saville as key figures in the label’s history, but woefully, less commonly documented is the labour from a significant cast of women in bands and women who worked backstage and in offices in a multitude of roles to ensure the smooth and successful running of the label on a day-to-day basis.
In 2016 Jez Kerr from A Certain Ratio tweeted: “Factory Records had 3 strong women during its history making sure s*hit happened: Lesley Gilbert, Tracey Donnelly, Tina Simmons.” These names should be just as recognisable, and with this book their stories are finally told.
In this first-hand oral history account of Factory Records from the inside perspectives of the women who were the bracings of the label, New York-based writer and radio presenter Audrey Golden brings together nearly 100 interviews which document the cultural, musical, technological and historical importance of women who contributed music, art, design, and critical administrative duties to Factory. And with its ‘Section 25 yellow’ cover and elegant Factory Records-styled typography, I Thought I Heard You Speak is an object of beauty in keeping with the label’s distinctive and iconic record sleeves.
Women were key players in post punk and here, Golden illuminates the women musicians of Factory: Carolyn Allen from The Wake, Lindsay Anderson and Lita Hira from Stockholm Monsters, Angie and Beth Cassidy from Section 25, Ann Quigley from Swamp Children and many more pioneering women tell their stories.
Rather than using a chronological approach, Golden has structured the book thematically to explore different facets of the scene including the musicians, the opening of the Haçienda, live gigs, technology, art and design, management and promotion, and a particularly fascinating deep dive into the backstory of New Order’s sensational ‘Blue Monday’ but from a fresh perspective. The biggest selling 12-inch of all time, Golden charts how the record’s success was largely thanks to the women who oversaw the logistics of the release - from negotiating sales and distribution, to pressing and licensing. Gillian Gilbert offers her insights into how the band crafted the track, while Tracey Donnelly, Laura Israel and Lesley Gilbert recall their crucial roles in record production, video editing and overseeing labels, supply and shipping. What becomes clear is that Factory was an ideas-driven label and the women behind the scenes helped keep it functional.
In the book, Factory’s PR Manager Donnelly explains how the legendary Factory numbering system simply had a practical function. “It helped with the chequebook. It was quite literally a cataloguing system. So when you’d make out cheques, you’d use the numbers.”
Within six months on the job, income from overseas licensing had trebled under Lindsay Reade’s stewardship. Tony Wilson’s ex-wife, Reade’s immensely savvy contribution to the label has been underplayed in Factory’s history until now.
The oral history format works well here. Golden has compiled her interviews and finessed them into a narrative that allows distinctive personalities and voices to shine through, adding a multi-faceted richness and authenticity. The beauty of this format is that when thoughtfully pieced together, direct quotes allow many stories to be illuminated that would otherwise be edited out and lost with a more narrative approach. If you think you knew everything there is to know about Factory Records, think again because this well-overdue fresh angle is compelling with many new recollections and insights from previously downplayed voices.
*Originally published in The Wire magazine.
A Horse at Night: On Writing
Amina Cain (Daunt)
This is a beautiful slim collection of essayistic enquiries that explore the reading experience, the spaces of reading and writing, and how the two are closely related. A thinking space, it’s a bit like a reading diary, a great book for readers and writers alike.
Amina Cain is also the author of a novel called Indelicacy which is about a cleaner at an art museum who wants to produce art herself. She’s also published two collections of short stories and her work has appeared in Granta and the Paris Review. While A Horse at Night is only about 130 pages long, it feels luxurious.
She starts with a thought or observation, then connects it back to something she has read. Cain explores the rise of interest in literature about toxic female friendships and female solitude, then delves into the work of Elena Ferrante as an example.
She looks at the idea of perfection, and how we sometimes describe a sentence or a book as “perfect”. But what does this actually mean? She critiques this, and comes to the conclusion that writing doesn’t need to be perfect if it has found its fitting form. Something exciting can come from that.
Also looking at the singular films of Chantal Akerman and mystical, visionary paintings by Hilma af Klint and Bill Viola, this is quite an interior and self reflective style of writing and reads a bit like autofiction or Rachel Cusk. She’ll ruminate on something like lighting, and then delves into ways it is used in literature.
Cain writes, “Even though I’m a writer, it’s not always language I’m drawn to first.” Like me, she seems interested in setting and atmosphere and how these can feed into narrative voice. I’m interested in the ways setting, location and even buildings can serve as characters. I love her exploration of authenticity, both as a person and as a writer. She looks at writing as each sentence reaching towards honesty and meaning, which leads her into looking at Jean Genet’s play The Maids.
Cain’s writing style is very attentive and thoughtful, clear and exacting. A Horse at Night is a rich and deep book. She writes that as you go deeper into your writing life, the more you trust yourself and I guess the same can be said about our reading lives, too.
There’s a lovely reading list at the end which includes all the books and authors she references, and it’s just wonderful. There are so many of my own favourites in there (including Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, Kate Zambreno) which she gives new resonance to, but also new-to-me books I’m looking forward to discovering.
The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time
Catherine Taylor (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

This is my book of 2023. I’ve long been an admirer of Catherine Taylor’s work as a literary journalist and critic, she’s an excellent reader and writer so I was thrilled in 2021 when Granta published Bleak Midwinter, a piece which was to become part of a longer work of memoir The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time. This is one of those books that hums with atmosphere and really stays with you, under the skin.
It’s personal, it’s political, it’s a coming-of-age tale, a family history, and has a strong New Zealand connection - Taylor’s late mother Pearl was a New Zealander and a deeply immersed lover of New Zealand literature, particularly Janet Frame, Patricia Grace and Fiona Kidman. Pearl named Taylor after Katherine Mansfield (there’s an amusing scene in The Stirrings where Catherine and her mother trek to see Mansfield’s grave in France), but her father insisted it be spelled with a ‘C’ which he declared is the “proper” spelling. I had just finished reading The Stirrings for a second time just before being the writer-in-residence at the beautiful Katherine Mansfield House and Garden in Wellington.
The memoir opens with a quietly unsettling scene where Taylor remembers being 13-years-old with her classmates and they’re gathered in the dank, mossy, crumbling Victorian cemetery in Sheffield. It’s the 1970s, and they dare each other to race through the cemetery in the dark. They’re forbidden to even be out at night because the serial killer known as The Yorkshire Ripper is on the loose and closing in on the region. The Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was eventually caught behind Taylor’s school. The sense of unease and impending terror is real, here, as is the biting fear and realisation that threats do not always come in the form of strangers, and dangers at hand might not be immediately obvious.
The Stirrings is a layered and compelling memoir of growing up during this time, under the unforgiving grip of Thatcher’s austere Britain, which people at the time felt was very personal. And it was personal. There’s a social backdrop of the Miners’ Strike of the 1980s, and the Falklands War. Anti-nuclear protest (in the 1980s Sheffield City Council declared itself a nuclear free zone) features here too. To know me is to know that I’ve been obsessed with Mick Jackson’s 1984 BBC television docu-drama Threads ever since I watched it over a decade ago, and, amazingly, Taylor writes in The Stirrings about being an extra in the film which is set in Sheffield. The title The Stirrings serves as an effective double meaning. Not only does it capture that coming-of-age atmosphere, it is a reference to the mid-1860s trade union militants in Sheffield from metal trades who reacted against poor working conditions for workers using new machinery.
While the subtitle specifies this as ‘A Memoir in Northern Time’ where Sheffield features strongly, this is just as much about Taylor’s strong relationship to New Zealand. Her mother was from Te Kuiti and grew up on a farm in Kaukapakapa, and Catherine herself was born in Hamilton. Taylor and I may have been born several years apart, but we were both born in the Waikato (at the same hospital in Hamilton, in fact), share a love of post-punk (“I’d smear frosted eyeshadow over my eyelids, apply mascara, either purple or green - I considered myself to be post punk - to my lashes,” she writes), particularly Jesus and Mary Chain. Like a glimpse into my own teenage music collection, House of Love’s ‘Destroy the Heart’, Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘There She Goes’ by The Las, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Happy House’, ‘Ivy Ivy Ivy’ by Primal Scream’, and significantly, ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials (when I was a child, this song felt like it had been written about my hometown, Ngaruawahia) provide the soundtrack to The Stirrings.
We also both have bookseller roots. Pearl Taylor ran an independent bookshop in Sheffield and had worked for Whitcoulls in Wellington (Catherine who also did time at a cutlery factory - one of the most “Sheffield” jobs you can imagine - worked at her mother’s bookshop for a time. The Human League’s Phil Oakey was a customer) which was a literary salon of sorts, running book events at a time when these weren’t as common as they are now.
Pearl was close friends with Alan Preston who was the founder of New Zealand’s most iconic literary salon - Unity Books Wellington, where I was a bookseller for six years. I think Pearl and Preston were probably both people who felt like outsiders: Pearl, displaced from New Zealand in her new grey home of Sheffield, and Preston as a quiet intellectual in conservative New Zealand, so I guess by each setting up their respective bookshops, they established places where they felt comfortable, which in turn were salons for people like them, places which still thrive today as people’s ‘Third Place’. And I suppose working at Unity provided me that same sort of refuge, too.
Taylor’s father was one of the founding faculty staff at the University of Waikato’s history department. When her family lived in Hamilton they lived on Cambridge Road in Hillcrest. Decades later, I attended many parties at a Cambridge Road flat where my friends Dr Richard Swainson and our friend the late Dean Ballinger lived. They held legendary parties where all the best Hamilton bands crammed into their sitting room to play. Down the road was the video rental store Video Ezy where Swainson worked. Because I had a weekly film column in the Waikato University magazine Nexus, I had a membership card that allowed me to rent all my videos for free. They had the best selection in town.
The Stirrings captures a kind of twofold panic of an inner anxiety (Taylor writes about bodies and illness) but also the fear and mistrust of an ominous figure (the Ripper, and men in general whether they be her father, boyfriends or medical professionals), and the threat of nuclear fallout and Britain under Thatcher. When Taylor herself went to Cardiff University in South Wales, she remembers her “fresher pack” as a first year student. It included mundane items like savoury rice and a tub of pot noodles. And a rape alarm:
“There was no mention of educating men not to harass women; it was still down to us to protect ourselves, to walk invisible.”
Taylor writes beautifully and evocatively of childhood memories of visits back to New Zealand with her mother, and the polarities between New Zealand and a monochromatic UK are striking. Idyllic summers of gathering pipi at Mt Maunganui (which is where I first learned to dig for pipi, too), fish & chips on the beach, catching a two-foot baby hammerhead shark which was then cooked and eaten over an open fire that same evening:
“This dubious success resulted in me being acclaimed a ‘real Kiwi’, in an initiation ceremony that involved having the shark’s blood smeared on my face.”
When asked to report back at school about her New Zealand summer holiday, Taylor writes she felt reluctant to do so because, “New Zealand was mine, not theirs.” She remembers:
“the vast blackness of the subtropical sky at night, a springy, velvet pincushion pierced with tiny pinheads of silver stars, from which I could easily pick out the Southern Cross.”
The pop culture of her day in the 1970s is the same that I was immersed in in the 1980s because New Zealand in the 1980s lagged behind the rest of the world and still screened TV shows from the 1960s and 70s. Sapphire and Steel, Columbo, Kojak. These were the shows my dad liked. She reads Smash Hits magazine which I was also obsessed with (probably a lesser Australian version though, I can’t remember) because it included song lyrics and fold out posters. One of my first crushes was Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys. At primary school I bought a copy of a book called The Fame Game by Mat Snow from the Lucky Book Club service. It was a collection of “rock and pop success stories” and I remember being so impressed reading that Tennant had also been a music journalist and assistant editor for Smash Hits.
The Stirrings is where memory and memoir share wavering ground, much like myth and history. With difficult family dynamics, it also shows how shared pasts can be painful, remembered from completely different perspectives by different family members, and how books and music are a refuge. One insight I really love:
“History is made at night. History is made in pubs and clubs, in record stores and on dance floors.”
These are the places where Taylor, like so many of us, found her tribe. The Stirrings is full of vivid memories of that thrill of literature, music and gigs opening up new worlds, friendships and possibilities.
The writing just gleams. It’s rich and evocative, and at times melancholy. The Stirrings crackles with a raw intensity, charged with insight, observation and presence.
Like Deborah Levy in the second instalment in her brilliant ‘Living Autobiography’ series The Cost of Living, Taylor writes crisply of places, buildings and rooms as living, breathing spaces which is particularly powerful when she recalls with stunning clarity a tragic memory. The Stirrings covers Taylor’s life from girlhood to young womanhood. She has gone on to do many interesting things in her career in London as a journalist, critic and publisher, and I would love to read a second instalment of her life story. I know a lot of readers will adore The Stirrings.
If you’re interested in any of these titles, you could look them up on BookHub.
No surprise how similar our taste is K! Looking forward to reading more from you.