I came late to this magnificent novel, just as the TV adaptation was screening, and I found myself watching it and reading it simultaneously. I think this was probably a mistake, as they are quite different in detail, but not in mood and intent. It's set 20 years after a pandemic has devastated society, killing 99.9% of the population, and follows a group of survivors struggling to get by in an unrecognisable world. The most powerful sections are the flashbacks to the days and years after the pandemic, when it's really driven home just what the characters have gone through to survive.

I've been a fan of Tsiolkas since his masterpiece The Slap (2008), and have read everything he has produced since. 7 1/2 is his attempt to write something a bit different, less confronting, less explicit, more about love and beauty and landscape in the form of auto fiction. It's narrated by a writer at a coastal retreat to write a book, and so it's a book within a book, as the reader switches between the story of the writer, and his evolving work. It's descriptive and evocative of the beauty of the coast, the weather and the sea, and the story within the story is engaging and powerful.

The fourth in Massey's delightful, small format hardback memoir series, Raiment chronicles poet Jan Kemp's early childhood and teenage years, and ends in 1974 when, in her early 20s, she leaves NZ for good. Kemp was born in 1949 in Hamilton, grew up in Waikato before moving to Auckland with her family, and attended Auckland University during a very fertile period in arts and literature. She broke new ground as a female poet at that time, and was friends with many of the big names in the burgeoning visual arts, pottery and literature worlds.

Ruth Shaw runs a tiny bookshop in Manapouri. This isn't a Shawn Bythell like memoir about life in the bookshop, although it does feature amusing stories of characters who visit, it's more a moving, charming and chatty memoir about the fantastically colourful life Ruth led before she owned the bookshop. She was born in the 1940s, and has lived a very full life in NZ, Australia and at sea around the South Pacific and Indonesia, and writes with a great deal of charm and emotion, it's funny, eccentric and extremely moving. This will be extremely well, deservedly so.

Nick Hunt has walked and written about most of Europe. He recreated the great walk of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and wrote the excellent Walking The Woods and The Water (2014). Now he sets off to walk in and experience 4 very different and unlikely European environments. He begins in Scotland's Arctic, the Cairngorms; then Poland's jungle, the last European remnant of primeval forest on the Poland Belarus border; then Spain's desert, in fact Europe's only true desert, in the south of Almeria; and then finally Hungary's steppe, the Great Plain Hortobagy.

This superb psychological thriller, set in and around the Ruahine Range, is narrated by Emily Kirkland, a successful children's book illustrator who returns from London to care for her father who is suffering from dementia. A neighbouring woman disappeared 25 years previously, and Emily gradually starts to realise that her father knows more about it than she ever knew. He's struggling with his memory, however, and Emily is also squabbling with older siblings about their father's care, and his will and what will happen with his estate after his death.