His name is Thomas Flannery and he’s 42 years old. Or is he? As a master bluffer, perhaps even the most rudimentary facts about him may just be another bunch of bull. Reading Bluffworld means delving into a particularly clever book. Author Patrick Evans, who has taught New Zealand literature and creative writing, is in a class of his own.

Flannery has a PhD in bluff, moseying down the university halls spouting fluffed-up knowlege from goodness knows where. Certainly not the books he hasn’t read, the thesis he hasn’t written, or the references unknown that he regularly alludes to, quotes, and regales others with. Flannery starts his university life with garden-variety bluff or bull, quite unsure of where his bluff begins and ends himself.

Evans’ footnotes really make this book, even more so if you posses a university lens to view it through. I’m sure there are those readers who will recognise the sensibilities, language, and comedy only a university frame of reference can afford. Each footnote is an exposé of his own protagonist’s dire attempts at seeming erudite. Evans cuts through Flannery’s extended hyperbole, consistent bluffing, and ever-apparent bulls**t with dry and comedic wit. Each footnote is a clarification, commentary, or straightout nod to dismiss the withering bunkum you have just read and move on. Quickly.

The more brazen and audacious Flannery becomes, the more he relies on the inner workings of the university environment and the special variety of inhabitants that walk the halls there, seemingly lapping up the pontificating addictive bluff he espouses. Perhaps it just intertwines with their own.

Bluffworld is a robust read and particularly clever, yet one I had to perserve with. Thomas Flannery, or is it “foolery”, learns bluff can only get you so far.

Crediting a sage professor who encouraged him to the see the comedy of campus life, Evans has done a fabulous job of bringing this to life in Bluffworld. If you can see through the smoke and mirrors, even more so.

From clinical psychologist, speaker, blogger, and best-selling author Gwendoline Smith comes The Book of Angst, written to help people recognise their anxieties and cope with them.

According to statistics, one in four New Zealanders will experience anxiety at some point in their lives.  A frightening thought when you consider it can lead to more dangerous conditions – both physical and mental. Irritability, palpitations, and restlessness can be all caused by anxiety, and without help, they could cause bigger problems down the road. It’s something that has to be tackled sooner rather than later, and Smith’s latest work is definitely a step in the right direction.

Like her previous books, The Book of Knowing and The Book of Overthinking, The Book of Angst is something that anyone can pick up and read without needing a degree in psychology to understand it. I especially liked her down-to-earth sense of humour, how she explained things without all the psychological jargon, and the illustrations that helped get her ideas across. A favourite of mine was the chapter on social anxiety – also known as the fear of judgment – and the idea that it’s actually linked to our instinctive need to be included. As someone who’s had this particular phobia, it’s one that I was interested in.  

As primates, the theory goes that as social animals, we all have an innate need to be liked, to be loved, and to feel included. Social anxiety comes from the fear of not being accepted or included by others. A person suffering from it may have been bullied or excluded from groups in the past, so they avoid groups or strangers to protect themselves, or as Smith puts it, to “avoid the anticipated pain of rejection, criticism, and exclusion.”

I cannot stress enough how important this book is. There really is no downside, and with everything that’s been going on with COVID-19 lately, this book is a literal must in anyone’s collection.

Author and personal finance journalist Mary Holm brings 184 relatable reader stories to the fore in A Richer You, giving advice in response. It’s all the more relatable in a New Zealand context and Holm is a stalwart of the genre, having written about financial matters for many years. The scenarios that you will find tell of the successes and failures, reflections and plans of many a letter writer, laying bare their personal journeys with money including their intrinsic fears, hopes, and aspirations.

There’s a familiarity with many of the letters, and their authors often sound as if they are writing to a dear and trusted friend. It’s great to have this level of insight into the lives of others and be able to recognise yourself and your own circumstances in some of them. There’s single mums striving for home ownership, retirees sitting pretty after making wise financial decisions, separated couples navigating the ins and outs of relationship property. Separations, investing, home ownership, saving for retirement, it’s all here. I learned a lot about KiwiSaver as well. As for what I didn’t learn, I now have some idea of the knowledge I need to seek in the future. With every circumstance, Holm provides sound and practical advice. Her readers are engaging and there is humour to be found in their words too. Holm certainly takes it on the chin when people strongly disagree with her advice or have pressing opinions to express, like being told she is a financial expert, not an agricultural one.

When it comes to the subject of money, there is so much to talk about. It can be deeply personal, come with emotional baggage, create a life less ordinary, bring joy or sadness, or make life a struggle.

A Richer You is a great place to start if you really want to know how safe your bank is, who else out there is investing, and whether you can put your ‘trust’ in family trusts.

From famed poet and author Tracey Slaughter comes Devil’s Trumpet, a triumphant collection of short stories that harmoniously mixes poetry and narrative writing to create something that I think is unique.

Each story is wonderfully imaginative, engaging the reader and keeping them hooked until the very end. Some will break your heart, others will intrigue you, but all of them command your attention.

Slaughter has done an amazing job here; I felt that each tale had a deeper meaning to it, and there were times when I found myself doubling back to find it. She has this ability to subvert your expectations completely and make you think about what she is trying to say rather than focus on the plot. These are not straightforward stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. I had no idea how they would conclude until the very last page.

Be warned though, her works are not going to be for everyone. She goes into some pretty dark places that can hit fairly close to home. From a wife’s cancer to cheating spouses and marriages falling apart, Devil’s Trumpet takes these stories and somehow finds a certain type of beauty lurking beneath them. 

For those unfamiliar with Slaughter’s work, her writing style can come off as a bit of a mystery. If I had to describe it in just one word, I would call it lyrical, but the truth is that ‘lyrical’ doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s on offer here.

Devil’s Trumpet leans heavily into the realms of poetry, so if you’re not a big fan of the form, I have a bad feeling you’ll lose interest before you really get started without giving Slaughter and the book a chance to work their magic on you. That would be a huge mistake in my opinion because, with a bit of perseverance, there really is a huge amount to enjoy here.

A compelling and melancholic protest in the face of the climate crisis, Ash Davida Jane’s How to Live With Mammals is a must-read for our generation. Through extended metaphors, dramatic irony, and very intentional perspective, Jane clears the smoke, showing us our burning, yet still beautiful world.

Jane’s voice is tinged with urgency, anxiety, and fear, but her words also paint images of hope and inspiration. Where her poems confront the inevitable decay in the face of an unsustainable lifestyle, they also present a hopeful alternative. Each poem sets a scene in which the world blossoms in all its splendor and hope, only to decay into false dreams, destroyed by human greed and the empty promises of consumerist ideals.

Jane’s writings often pit opposites against one another. The abnormal and grotesque become normalised, as in the poem 2050 where a post-apocalyptic world soaked in air pollution and acid rain provides a home for playing children. In all the other animals are in their prime, Jane juxtaposes the natural against the artificial, placing animals within cities where they are dependent on human innovation, pondering the possibility that our human impact is so great we may not be able to reverse the damage we have done.

The collection recognises a disconnect between society’s God-complex and the delusion that notion is. pool party poignantly captures humanity’s unsustainability, sending humans into space in search of new homes just to destroy them and “[draw] up plans for a new planet without the design flaws of the last”. location, location turns Venus into suburbia, where we slowly watch our Earth fall apart and find “new ways to ruin our lives”.

How to Live With Mammals desperately asks us to recognise humanity’s dependency and vulnerability. It paints the beauty of our current world but with nostalgia, exposing humanity’s greed, denial, and delusion in an attempt to wake us before our world becomes the distant memory of Jane’s poems.

More The Twilight Zone than The Pit and the Pendulum, many of these eight short stories have been written for The New Yorker and collected here for the first time.

In a book that is designed to scare all who believe in the malevolence of social media, we are taken down paths of a haunted house (Signal) with a ghost that takes pleasure (or is it) in watching children absorbed by social media – be it the internet, PlayStation, or any gizmos that drive people who grew up with hula hoops, conkers, and hopscotch insane. You can hear these people inwardly scream, “In my day we all played outside!” But this is the now, a time when the hosts of a wedding at a posh mansion provide a special room for the children to indulge in their fantasies whilst the ceremony is going on.

In a society that finds itself increasingly unable to switch off the machine, these skeletal missives are the finger-pointing messages to be wary about what is real and what is not.

Most of the characters embedded between the lines are academics, scholars, professors – in short, those who you’d think would know better. They are better able to focus and analyse, yet still remain on the lower rungs when it comes to figuring out how to rage against the machine.

The same night that I read the story Coffin Liquor I was plagued by a horrendous dream in which myself and staff were working 24-hour shifts at a record store whilst surrounded by ‘suits’ babbling on in pseudo-speech about blamestorming, gig economy, clickbait, and offshoring. What the linguists call lexical innovation. This haunts the most dislikeable smarty-pants Professor Watkins
who is delivering a lecture in Romania. Using his translation earphones, he taps into audiobooks only to find that the storylines from both Charles Dickens and Richard Dawkins have been hacked (or were they?) to intrinsically sound the same. The point being made, once again, is about technology going AWOL. That is a fear untoward itself.

Eight tales of technophobia then.

I’m not quite sure where Cook, Eat, Repeat stops being a cookbook and starts being a novel; it’s like a melting pot of literary and culinary offerings.

A little bit of Lawson’s heart and soul seems to accompany her recipes. Inside you will find ingredients, recipes, and stories with her memories entwined. There’s the wistful fondness she feels for her spiced bulgur wheat with roast vegetables, as it was the last meal she cooked for friends before lockdown. There’s the soupy rice with celeriac and chestnuts, which Lawson says is a favourite in her home and I know why. It was rich, warm, and nutty. Satisfying pre-winter fare.

Cook, Eat, Repeat is not a quit sugar, ditch the cheese, and lose the dessert type cookbook. Instead there’s a whole chapter dedicated to pleasures and in classic Nigella fashion a whole narrative on the joy she celebrates in food. It’s just pleasures, no guilty involved. Food like pasta with clams and bottarga is to be enjoyed. There’s something here for all palates. There’s the black pudding meatballs, which for all intents and purposes look delicious but not enough to ever consume. For the brave and unsqueamish, they may just be a culinary delight. Oxtail bourguignon makes an appearance too, though again not on my table.

There’s pairings like pappardelle with cavolo nero and ‘Nduja. Lawson eloquently describes it as a “gorgeous and wintry, rib-sticker of a dish just right to bolster and brighten, where skies are dark and the air is chill”. There’s a little bit of poetry here and even a vegan lemon polenta cake that will not disappoint.

Cook, Eat, Repeat is exactly what you would expect from an author invested in food and the joy that comes with it. It seems on occasion Lawson’s voice leaps from the page as she shares her thoughts, inspirations, and kitchen temptations – like eating flapjacks before they are cold, unabashedly without a care for them falling apart.

At some point, many of us are confronted with questions that seek to define the nature of our existence. Questions that ask – what is our consciousness? How do we find our purpose? What is purpose? In the novel Tranquility and Ruin, Danyl McLauchlan is on a quest to beat his long-term mental health problems. His journey takes him on a path of self-discovery where he explores the answers to life’s tough questions in a bid to relieve himself of his troubles. He writes first of his experience meditating in Buddhist monasteries and follows with his time at a retreat by the New Zealand branch of Effective Altruism.

Effective altruism is a movement that I had never heard of. Their objective is to challenge human morality and the outcome is endless interesting discussions. One such discussion involved the infamous question posed by the philosophical teacher Peter Singer, who asks, “if you could save a child that was drowning right in front of you, would you?” People’s first reaction is to be shocked and say “of course”, but as Singer points out, there are children dying all over the world, so why are we not trying to save them?

I have visited many of the kinds of places described in the book. You experience crazy things when you are in a meditative state and whilst many choose to decide that there are angels, spirits, or a higher self involved, I am (and it seems McLauchlan is too) far more cynical. I do not have enough word count to explain the crazy events that happen during these retreats, but things get pretty wild and it’s easy to lose perspective.

I love books about spirituality, but I am also a social science student who is obsessed with facts and research. McLauchlan’s journey is not simply a personal experience, but one supported with studies and evidence. This was one of those rare times I read a book that discusses topics and themes in a way that I do in my personal life. I loved it and have already recommended it to so many of my friends!

19-year-old Mattie (Lily Harper) is about to move out of home for the first time. Mum (Trudy Pearson) is taking her to college in just a few hours, but here’s the thing… Mattie hasn’t packed her bag yet! You know when you’re spring cleaning or moving and every item you own suddenly springs forth memories that take you back to a different time or special moment from your past? That’s happening to both Mattie and Mum as they attempt to bundle her life into a duffle bag, reminiscing all the way. Meanwhile through direct audience address, Mum shares her experience of raising a child with Down syndrome.   

Mattie’s imagination is extraordinary, her memories vividly brought to life in Up Down Girl. A number of production elements help us see into her world. Firstly, her friends (the delightful Michiel van Echten and Mycah Keall) pop out of the wings to play police officers and doctors, evil grocery shoppers and hot Westlife singers. They also serve as backup dancers for the fabulous lip-sync numbers, which Harper nails with total star power. Then there’s Ian Harman’s bright, homely set and Isadora Lao’s colourful lighting design, which leans into Mattie’s every wonderful whim. Let’s not forget the old overhead projector that sets so many magical scenes.

From patient to cranky, loving to fierce, Pearson beautifully portrays all the nuances of a mother exhausted by prejudice. Harper’s performance is funny and sassy as all heck. The relationship between the two characters gives me tingles, accentuated by the chemistry and respect the two actors clearly share.   

Up Down Girl is a feel-good play that leaves the audience grinning from ear to ear. At the same time, it is a poignant, triumphant tale of overcoming adversity (preferably while wearing a cape), embracing our differences, and the unique perspective that a person with Down syndrome can bring to the world.

Needless to say, it hit me right in the heart.