Nick Bollinger is a music writer and broadcaster, musician and former postie and teacher, who grew up in Wellington. Goneville is a loving and intimate portrait of the New Zealand music scene in the 1970s, set against the social and narcotic evolution of the times. The bands who pass through the books pages range from Blerta to Dragon, Chris Knox to Quincy Conserve, but always in the foreground is Rick Bryant; there are drugs and alcohol, Muldoon and the 1981 Springbok tour, clubs and pubs, endless tours in old buses.

4 3 2 1 may be Paul Auster's greatest achievement, at 866 pages, it's certainly his longest book. It begins in 1947 in New Jersey with the birth of Archibald Isaac Ferguson. From that moment, Ferguson's life, and the book, take four separate, simultaneous and independent paths. Each chapter sets out a few years in each version of the characters life; after 4 versions, we return to the first for the next few years, and so on. It is a bit hard to follow, as each life shares some of the peripheral characters, but the events unfold differently.

Peter May is a prolific and superlative thriller writer. I've only read the first of The Lewis Trilogy, The Blackhouse, which is superbly evocative of the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's isolated Outer Hebrides. He returns to Lewis with The Coffin Road, but this book is not connected to the trilogy, and has different characters. It's very good! It opens with a man bewildered on a beach, with no memory of who he is.

Robbie Robertson was the guitarist and creative heart of The Band who found themselves at the centre of many significant musical events in the 60s and 70s. He grew up half-Jewish, half-Mohawk on the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario, Canada, then, at 16, left on a musical odyssey that saw him travel to the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere, playing music with a range of influential collaborators including Ronnie Hawkins and most notably Bob Dylan.

Very much a thriller in the vein of Harlen Coben, I only read this because it's set on Orkney, and I wanted to relive that landscape. Johnstone evokes the island extremely well, his knowledge of the towns of Kirkwall and Stromness, as well as the more remote areas, is well portrayed. However, the plot and characters are not all that plausible or memorable; the book races along without ever truly convincing this reader that anyone would behave in the manner that these characters do. That's not unusual in a thriller, though, and this is a pretty enjoyable one.

I came across this book, originally published in Danish, on the Brainline website, where it was reviewed from the perspective of a person either with a brain injury, or the caregiver of such a person. I ordered a copy. The novel is a psychological thriller, in which a man's personality changes as a result of his brain tumour, and the personality change triggers his catastrophic subsequent actions. It's narrated by his wife, and the tension hinges around how much of his behaviour he is culpable of, and how much was inevitable given his condition.