Events
We’ve got lots of great book events on the calendar at the moment 

Book News
The publisher of Otago University Press Wendy Harrex retired this month after 20 years in the role 

Kevin Jones, former Manager of PDL dies

NZSA 2013 Youth Mentorships Announced 

Book review
A Forager’s Treasury by Johanna Knox 

From around the internet
This is an excellent explanation of why you should read to your children.

Bookman Beattie on Radio Live talking about His Own Steam

‘Please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.’ — Patti Smith 

This book is in stores now.

It doesn’t happen often enough; you come across a book that so delights and changes the way you look at the world around you; Johanna Knox’s A Forager’s Treasury definitely enchants.

I’m a plant-lover with an extensive kitchen garden, but I’ve learnt so much in reading this book. I now look at roadside verges and weedy lawns in a completely new way. I see food everywhere. Not many people get excited by the sight of onion weed. Now I can’t wait for those little white bonnets to pop up ready for use in weed pakoras or parmesan crisps. And I’m compiling a long list of all the things I’m going to do with kawakawa, from spice blends and flavouring pannacotta to perfumes and liqueurs.

The writing is delightful, full of warmth and inspiring detail. I love the stories of her less-than-successes as much as her successes. The wide-eyed aspirations of a young girl who buried a plastic bag of apples in the garden so she could surprise her family mid-winter with perfectly preserved produce. And it’s the telling details of her wide experience that I really appreciate.

“The enormous, floppy, fuzzy leaves of tree mallows are known as an emergency toilet paper substitute, but I can say from experimentation that they have a nasty, squeaky, water-repellent feel, like 1970’s velour, and ‘emergency’ is the operative word.” (p92)

The book provides a very practical framework to make your foraging dreams a reality. There is a lovely introduction to the foraging ethos and rules of engagement. A wide variety of foragable treasures available in New Zealand are described beautifully with pretty little illustrations. However, this is not an identification guide. You will need to take another book on your missions–excellent examples are listed in the Resources.

This is a book to keep safe at home to inspire, and then hurry back to with your goodies. Because, the real diamond in this book, is the artful prescription for using your foraged finds. I love the way Knox has approached the recipe section. Instead of a list of specific ingredients combined in staid ways, A Forager’s Treasury opens up the world of materials to work with and then provides the formulas to create your own culinary, medicinal, fragrant and even colour magic.

Solid methods of preserving your bounty are presented, and a wonderful selection of recipes give you the foundation necessary to embrace experimentation. ‘The Art of the Wild Salad’ is a charming example covering the mixing and matching of flavours, and then gives a table of taste groups so you can blend something incredible.

Like all good books these days, there is a website to go with it. This is a great way for the author to update any areas of the book that may have been lacking. Printable indexes by plant name and recipe have been included. The photo ID gallery is a really good add-on with very clear images. I look forward to seeing what else will appear at http://foragerstreasurygallery.blogspot.co.nz

Johanna Knox’s A Forager’s Treasury is a gem of a book. Beautifully illustrated, delightfully written and full of wonderful information that will be sitting pride of place on my bookshelf for a very long time.

Reviewed by Anna Butterfield www.loveplantlife.com

A Forager’s Treasury
by Johanna Knox
Published by Allen & Unwin
ISBN 9781877505164

WIN! A copy of The Forager’s Treasury
Thanks to Allen & Unwin we have a copy of The Forager’s Treasury to give away. Enter below to win… good luck!

A Rafflecopter giveaway

Book events
Paula Green launches her new poetry collection at Vic Books tomorrow night – all welcome 

Book news
New Zealand’s extinct moa subject of award-winning popular science book

Budget missed an opportunity – Booksellers NZ

Auckland Writers & Readers Festival
Twitter says, “Kudos to Unity Books and The Women’s Bookshop for their superb bookstall. Indie booksellers – they try harder, do better”.

An Hour With Jackie Kay 

Sylvie Simmons – Mr Cohen Revealed

Lauraine Jacobs – Everlasting Feast 

From around the internet
My happy place: Graham Beattie, blogger 

The Return of Fleur Adcock 

Book review
The Nature of Ash by Mandy Hager

Opportunities
Win! With the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards 

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Saturday 18 May, 11.30am

Scottish poet, fiction writer and memoirist, Jackie Kay is one of my favourite writers, so I was beside myself with excitement about hearing her read and speak. When you have loved any public figure for a long time, there is always the fear the the ‘real life’ experience won’t meet your (no doubt unreasonably high) expectations, but this was not the case for Jackie Kay. She was wonderful and this was my favourite session. She has a strong stage presence and shines with humour, wisdom, optimism. It’s an infectious brew!

The session was expertly hosted by New Zealand writer Stephanie Johnson who asked intelligent questions of Jackie Kay.

Early in the session, Jackie read her poem ‘Fiere’ (pronounced ‘Fairy’ but with a rolled scottish ‘R’) from the book of same name, a poem about enduring female friendship. Her broad Scottish accent is delightful and that, combined with the poem’s musicality, was stunning.

See her read it here – trust me, it’s worth a watch!

When she finished there was a collective sigh of satisfaction from the audience and Jackie said, “I love the wee moans people give at poetry readings. We poets live for those wee moans.”

Jackie Kay spoke of her New Zealand connection – her (adoptive) parents met in Christchurch at the Coffee Pot Cafe. This is Jackie’s first visit to New Zealand but she feels like it is something of ‘a pilgrimage of my parent’s love’ and she was headed to Christchurch after the festival to visit some of those key sites in her parents history. She talked about a plastic ‘Maori’ doll she had as a child, sent over from her grandmother who was still in New Zealand. “I loved that doll. I called her Ngaire. One day, though, a girl came up to me on the street and said to me: ‘Just because you’re a darkie, doesnae mean you’ve got to have a darkie doll.’

Jackie Kay has a Nigerian birth father and was adopted by a white Scottish couple, so grew up black in a very white community. Incidents of casual racism peppered her childhood and even now she is often interrogated by fellow Scots about her lineage. Her adoptive father loved jazz and she said she would stare at the covers of his jazz records, at the black faces on the covers and saw them as her “earliest black family: Aunty Ella Fitzgerald, Uncle Duke Ellington.” She spoke at length about the subject of her memoir Red Dust Road – her search for her birth parents, her exploration of Nigeria where her birth father was from and her realisations of the extent to which we are shaped by love more than genetics.

“Identity is fluid. Love is what really matters. People who feel deeply loved have a different aura about them” she said. Her adoptive parents did deeply love and cherish her. When she went to Nigeria she felt “the land was welcoming me, even when my father wasn’t.” Her birth father, a deeply Christian man saw her as “a living emodiment of his past sins.”

She read other poems and excerpts from her short stories, endearingly skipping over the sex scenes “that’s all a bit much for an Auckland writing festival audience at eleven in the morning”. Her fiction writing about old age was very moving, artful writing which raises questions about how we treat old people in our society.

Jackie Kay’s session mirrored the experience of reading her work, one minute you’re laughing until tears roll down your cheeks, next minute the tears are not mirthful but sad. The best wisdom is often framed in humour and Jackie Kay has the uncanny knack to provide both in perfect balance.

After the ‘hour with Jackie Kay’ I took the opportunity to have my own ‘minute with Jackie Kay’. I waited in a very long line for my chance to have a quick exchange with this great author while she signed ‘Red, Cherry Red‘ one of her poetry books for me. I had true fan-girl nerves and as I stood there I wrestled with the dilemma of whether or not to give her the copy of my own poetry book, ‘The Comforter‘.

Although I wanted to, I was also worried it was inappropriate, pushy, over-the-top…but when the moment arrived, I did it, nervously burbling to her “sorry, sorry, probably the last thing you need is more junk to cram into your suitcase”. Jackie said “This is not junk, it’s a gift. Thank you so very much for bringing it for me, it’s wonderful” and smiled at me with a grin so warm I basked in it for the rest of the day. What a gracious and generous writer she is, and a deeply human and humane person.

Written by Helen Lehndorf.

Thank you to Auckland Writers & Readers Festival for providing Helen’s ticket to this event.

Fiere
by Jackie Kay
Published by Picador
ISBN 9780330513371

Red Dust Road
by Jackie Kay
Published by Atlas
ISBN 9781935633341

Red, Cherry Red
by Jackie Kay
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN 9780747589792

The Comforter
by Helen Lehndorf
Published by Seraph Press
ISBN 9780473196073

This book is in bookshops now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

The Nature of Ash by NZ author Mandy Hager is a thrilling read; a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards in the Young Adult category. It tells the story of Ash McCarthy, who is enjoying living in a student hostel. When the police make a visit to the hostel, his life is changed forever. His father has been killed by a bomb that destroyed his workplace.

Ash returns home to Wellington, to his little brother Mikey who has Downs Syndrome. Still trying to understand what has happened, Ash stumbles on several threat letters and a hint that his long-dead mother may in fact be alive. While his world is turning upside-down, the outside world is too; New Zealand is on the brink of war.

Suddenly no-one can be trusted- Ash finds himself fighting to protect the lives of Mikey, himself, and friends Jiao and Travis. Drowning in mystery and lies, Ash must learn the truth, or lose everything. As the urgency of their escape grows, the stakes become higher and higher. Danger laces their mission to survive- and the enemy could be anyone…

The Nature of Ash is a phenomenal book, which deserves the highest praise for its wonderful characters, unique voices and almost-unbearable suspense. With a fast pace that has you racing to reach the end, the tension and thrills of Mandy Hagers’s novel are sure to grip its’ readers.

You will be stunned by the sharp twists; this chilling roller-coaster read will have you on the edge of your seat. I highly recommend The Nature of Ash to older teens – adults, too- this is not a tale you will forget in a hurry.

Reviewed by Tierney.

The Nature of Ash
by Mandy Hager
Published by Random House
ISBN 9781869799038

Sylvie Simmons – click image for source

Both host Noelle McCarthy and writer Sylvie Simmons looked every inch rock’n'roll for this session, both head to foot clad in black velvet/lace/denim. One of the world’s leading rock journalists, Simmons is the author of a recent biography of Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man  during the writing of which she had access to both the man himself and his archives. (She has also written biographies of Serge Gainsbourg and Neil Young.)

She charmed the audience from the first minute with her honesty, wit and ability to tell a tale well. Clearly this was a session filled with music-nerds and Leonard Cohen-devotees hoping for juicy details and original anecdotes from biographer Simmon’s close proximity with the enigmatic musician, and she delivered both in abundance.

Noelle spoke of how Simmon’s strength as a biographer was the way she cultivated a sense of intimacy between the reader and the subject: “She allows you to meet the artist and to be party to their whole life: their creative process, their family, their public and private faces.” Simmonds described Leonard Cohen as “wise, droll and cool”, a man who was enjoying “a tsunami of love and affection at the end of his life.” Earlier in his career, his home country Canada and the USA were slow to see his genius and he was bigger in (according to Simmond’s) “the darker countries: the UK and Scandanavia.”

Early on, Cohen had a very conflicted relationship to his career. He suffered depression and always questioned his own motives for wanting fame. He said that taking his music on tour in the early days he felt like “a parrot and a pimp” but now he enjoys performing and touring and enjoys the irony of having “full-employment” in his seventies. He said of returning to touring after his long absence: “It was like returning to a beach years after your last visit to see if a sandcastle you’d built was still there.”

Sylvie Simmonds said she was shocked to discover the Cohen still enjoys drugs, including LSD and speed. When she commented on his use of speed, Cohen said “You should hear how slow I am when I’m not on speed.” She described the process of writing a biography of a living subject as being like “writing a murder mystery without a corpse” and enjoys the deep research involved. She said the the haunting quality of Leonard Cohen’s music was due to it being a mixture of ‘the sacred, the profane and the humane” and that Cohen (primarily a poet) saw his songs as “a mixture of prayer”.

This session was thick with wonderful details about Leonard Cohen, real gems, delightful morsels for the Cohen fan. My favourite morsels were:

• Cohen likes McDonald’s ‘Fillet’o'Fish’ burgers, but prefers to get it to take-away so he can eat it at home with a glass of wine
• As a young person, he was told by his family and his family Rabbi that he couldn’t sing
• As a teenager he learned hypnosis and mesmerism, some of the skills of which have been useful in his performance career
• Leonard was given slightly special treatment when he joined the Zen monastery on Mount Baldy: he had his own toilet, and was allowed to have a coffee and a cigarette each morning at 3am before joining the other monks for meditation
• When meditating, he said he always had to work through his ‘Top 40′ sexual memories before he could settle his mind to meditation

There was much more besides, but perhaps the best way to get the low-down on Leonard Cohen is to read Simmons wonderful biography. At the end of the session, an audience member asked Simmons about how she became a rock journalist, she said it was all that she ever wanted to do because of her passion for both music and writing, but “because I appeared not to have a penis, I had to leave the UK for the USA where in Los Angeles I had a shot at it.”

Noelle McCarthy did a great job of hosting the session with energy and intelligent questions and Sylvie Simmons finished the session with a live ukelele version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ showing that not only is she a phenomenal writer, but she can sing with a beautiful high voice which sounded like early (pre-heroin) Marianne Faithful.

Here she is singing the same song at a different event:

Leaving the session with a new version of a classic Cohen song resounding around my head was the perfect way to exit this juicy, funny and riveting session.

Written by Helen Lehndorf.

Thank you to Auckland Writers & Readers Festival for providing Helen’s ticket to this event.

 I’m Your Man
by Sylvie Simmons
Published by Vintage
ISBN 9780099549321

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Friday 17 May, 4pm

Launched just three weeks ago, Lauraine Jacobs’ new book Everlasting Feast is the best kind of food memoir, one with lush food photography (by Elizabeth Clarkson) and some of her signature recipes. (All the flowers in the book are from Lauraine’s own garden.)

Lauraine Jacobs wrote for Cuisine magazine for many years and now writes for The Listener. In her new book, Lauraine tells colourful stories from her rich career in food and food writing in a way which is both educational and lively.

Lauraine has previously published ten recipe books and so felt with this book it was time to do something a bit different, to bring her love of story-telling together with her passion for food. Through close telling of her own journey with food, Lauraine explores the country’s journey in food since the 1950s. In this session, Lauraine spoke engagingly about both the national and international food scenes with a wry sense of humour and a sharp intelligence.

The book covers Lauraine’s life from a five-year old Brownie and is a very Auckland book, featuring the various places around the city where Lauraine has lived and worked. Lauraine has encountered many notable food writers in her career, especially through her involvement with the International Association of Culinary Professionals, which she first joined, then eventually chaired. Through the Association she met Julia Childs, who she said was a spirited raconteur who would often still be telling stories in the bar at 1am, a woman who truly earned her legendary title and who bought real cooking back to America in an era of Betty Crocker packet foods and tuna casseroles made with cans of Campbell’s soup.

Lauraine spoke passionately about the importance of starting our cooking from fresh, seasonal produce. In her book she writes in depth about her favourite ingredients: lemons, herbs, butter and salt.

She said her favourite quick meal is fresh fish with salad, which is a lovely fusion of those four ingredients – the lemon and butter enliven the fish, the salad is bought to life with lemon, herbs and salt. Lauraine somewhat controversially declared that ‘most New Zealand butter is rancid on the shelf’, that the paper packaging does not adequately keep it fresh and that for years she has bought Danish butter because it is cultured butter and as such tastes fresher. The local exception to this being Louis Road Creamery butter, which has caused her to buy local butter again. According to Lauraine, the best way to treat butter is to cut it into small cubes at the time of purchase, wrap them in foil, freeze and take out as required. She also believes that our local olive oils are better than most imports.

When asked by a member of the audience for what she considered one of her signature dishes, she chose her Red Salad (shown above) a salad developed for a special Christmas issue of Cuisine magazine, which she believes to be one of her most successful recipes. This recipe features in the new book. 

When asked what the next trend would be in food, and she spoke hilariously about cake trends “Cupcakes are dead. Macarons have now been over done. Whoopie Pies never gained traction. Next up is the artisanal eclair.” She recently travelled to San Francisco and encountered beautiful eclairs there made with rich chocolate ganache and paper-thin pieces of dark chocolate as an embellishment. Apparently, the eclair is also on the rise in Paris, so we can expect to see them appearing in New Zealand cafes soon.

Lauraine was also asked what her ‘Desert Island Cookbook’ would be and she cited Constance Spry’s 60 year old The Constance Spry Cookery Book because it contains solid recipes for everything from casseroles to jams, but a more recent book which has inspired her is the Ottolenghi: The Cookbook.

According to Lauraine, one of the biggest changes in New Zealand food is how often we shop for ingredients now, the
notion of ‘the weekly shop’ is dying and people are shopping at
supermarkets on average four times a week now.

I really enjoy people with strong opinions plainly spoken, and Lauraine Jacobs delivered on this front. She is clearly a deeply intelligent person, with both an artistic flair for beautiful food and the analytical, forward thinking mind of someone who is always looking to the future of the food industry, how it might improve and change. This was an excellent, educational session and the hour flew by in an instant.

Further recommendations from Lauraine’s session:

• Recipe search and organising site 
• Specialist food-writing bookshop featuring new and vintage food books

Written by Helen Lehndorf. 

Thank you to Auckland Writers & Readers Festival for providing Helen’s ticket to this event.

Everlasting Feast
by Lauraine Jacobs
Published by Random House
ISBN 9781775532538

The Constance Spry Cookery Book
by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume
Published by Grub Street
ISBN 9781908117175

Ottolenghi: The Cookbook
by Yotam Ottolenghi
Published by Ebury Press
ISBN 9780091922344

They’re doing amazing work reviewing books, engaging their kids with the stories, baking cakes (from A Great Cake) and creating beautiful things inspired by our finalist books. They’re real gems.

In that spirit, here’s a couple of giveaways happening at the moment that we don’t want you to miss out on.

Win a copy of Maumahara ki tērā Nōema (Remember that November) by Jennifer Beck, illustrated by Lindy Fisher and translated by Kawata Teepa over on Miriam’s blog.

To enter, just leave a comment after Miriam’s book review – she’s also created a video of her reading the book out loud, which means it’s a great bedtime listen for kids.

Win a one-off child’s coat inspired by Mr Bear Branches.
Lisa was inspired by finalist book Mr. Bear Branches to sew a one-off child’s coat. This is a very special giveaway and you’ve got until Friday to enter to win.

Enter by leaving a comment on Lisa’s blog.

Good luck!

Written by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

Book events
Mary Varnham reveals what Awa Press looks for in travel books and Tilly Lloyd tells which sell best at Unity: Travcom, Museum Hotel (Wellington) today at 6pm

Book news
AUP’s new catalogue is out! We’re excited to present another year of adventurous publishing. Check out the… 

New release book
Toa by Vaughan Rapatahana 

From around the internet
Dan Brown’s Inferno: the first reviews, and a very good parody

A fascinating look at book covers, before and after: the initial concept, then the final design

Book reviews
One Step Beyond by Malcolm Law

The children of Green Bay Primary review Melu

Snow White’s Coffin by Kate Camp  

The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen 

Magical Margaret Mahy by Betty Gilderdale  

Red Rocks by Rachael King 

From around the internet
Kate Atkinson talked to NZ Herald ahead of her appearance at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival this weekend

The cover for the 12th and final book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series has been revealed!   

Insightful interview with Emma Martin on the Arts on Sunday about the craft of writing short stories