This book has received mixed reviews, some marvelling at Grimshaw’s sparce and satirical prose and others questioning the credibility of characters. The Night Book started its life as a short story (published in The Listener, January 2009) and this remains as the first part of the book. However, you can almost see where it’s been stitched together and, for me, I felt the polished, mysterious, compelling beginning belied the rest of the story.

Set in Auckland, Dr Simon Lampton is battling family problems and an uneasy relationship with his two daughters, one of whom is adopted. Meanwhile, Roza Hallwright – wife of the Hallwright – is battling her own demons and trying to stay out of the lime-light as her husband becomes Prime Minister. Simon and Roza’s connection came as no surprise to the reader but, somehow, it felt that this connection was holding the whole story together. While some characters were clearly based on real-life New Zealand policital and public figures, others seemed flimsy and, at times, embarrassingly stereotypical. Simon flees his home troubles to slum it in South Auckland with poor, solo Mereana and Roza seeks comfort in a shallow friend whose life seems to consist of manicures and getting high.

The underlying idea in this novel was an intriguing one. However, as I didn’t connect with the selfish main characters or really believe in the way they behaved, I was left questioning whether this was a comment on society or just an observation of a small part of it.

This is a delightful collection of poems. Moving through her own history now, Anna presents poetry on family life, connections and her time in Mid-west America. The final poems refer openly to her mother’s illness and all the moments that have breezed along in the earlier poems seem all the more poignant by the end of the book.

I love the way she speaks to the people in her life through these poems with many ‘characters’ appearing in dedications again and again.

Where Anna’s debut, Good Luck, felt like the clever work of an academic mind, this collection feels satisfyingly personal and reflective.

There are some really fascinating aspects to this book. I love the idea of collecting as a compulsion and form of preservation and our desire to re-write history – especially when family’s involved.

When Rosemary moves back to her Grandfather’s farm to work on her thesis, she becomes obsessed with the lives of earlier inhabitants. She imagines the fey Dora, first wife of Great-Great-Grandfather Henry, joining the secret world of tattooing as a way of collecting and connecting to Henry’s own obsessions. In her isolation, Rosemary starts to over-identify with Dora and feel the ghostly presence of a more immediate tragic past.

Rosemary’s strongest connection to her late Grandfather was through their mutual interest in Taxidermy, which is another fascinating aspect that is explored. The idea of stuffing rarities to preserve the memory of an endangered species is both tragic and ironic.

There are several self-conscious nods to gothic novels – especially Northanger Abbey and Wuthering Heights – which work in that they’re openly acknowledged through Rosemary’s work, but at times seem a little clunky. The sense of history –  imagined, hoped for and ultimately accepted – brings to light the skeletons and specimens that lurk in our own cabinets of curiosity.

This is an intriguing story with threads of mystery, identity, art and stone. Clare Lacey is on a lifelong mission to find her father, who went out for cigarettes one morning and was never seen again. While at an Art History conference in Ireland, Clare continues the search by following a few tenuous leads.

The chapters alternate from third person to first person, always from Clare’s point of view. Through this we see Clare on her present journey and also her as a child in Oamaru. I have no idea why the narrative alternated in this way, but perhaps this is another way in which Fiona Farrell is questioning identity and time. She writes, “In Limestone I wanted to write about time – and in particular how I find myself thinking about time as I become older. On the one hand, there is time as it is experienced in a single human lifetime. One part of this novel is made up of a quest…The other part of the novel is about geological time – and in that sense of time, human lives whether fictional or actual, shrink to a speck, to almost nothing.”

I enjoyed the ‘quest’ nature of the narrative and the connection to the past through Art History, layers of rock and drawing as a way of preserving or exhuming memories.