It's been over 20 years since Peter Walker published The Fox Boy, an account of the kidnapping of a young Māori boy in 1868, and although he has published a couple of novels in the years since, this book marks a welcome return to his unique style of history writing. Hard By The Cloud House is largely about the history and myth surrounding the Haast's Eagle, Te Hikioi, the largest eagle the world has ever known, which probably became extinct in around 1400.

In this memoir, Susan Johnson describes her late in life return to the Greek Island of Kythera where she spent some happy times in her earlier life. She asks her 85 year old mother to come with her, and it doesn't go well. This is an evocative, original and funny examination of the mother-daughter relationship under pressure, against the background of an exotic location. It's not a My Tuscan Villa kind of book - the Greece that she describes is too gritty and uncompromising for that, but it comes across as a hospitable place for those who approach it with the right attitude.

Toy Fights is the funniest book I've read in years. There were times when I had to stop reading as I was laughing so much. That doesn't happen very often. Don Paterson is a poet and academic, who grew up in Dundee, and initially made his living as an jazz musician and composer. This book covers only the first 20 years of his life, and ends as he makes his way to London to escape his rather dismal childhood. At this stage he hasn't written a single poem. He says he'll write the sequel if enough people read this one.

Lucy Lippard is an art critic, primarily, but is also known for her activism, curating and staunch feminism. She has written over 20 books, and curated 50-odd major art exhibitions. This highly illustrated but compact book is a meandering, but always fierce investigation into the cultural and political geography in the South West of the US. It proved to be an essential companion to our recent road trip through the region, as she examines the impact of mining, especially uranium, fracking, the politics of water, Indian land rights, and even adobe building.

In this brilliant, restrained novel, Eng weaves true events and real historical figures with fictional characters in Penang in 1921, with stories from 1910, to produce a tightly plotted and atmospheric novel. Somerset Maugham appears, and is told the true story which became his play and short story The Letter. Sun Yet Sen, the Chinese revolutionary also appears, alongside fictional characters. There's a huge cast of memorable characters, and the author lays out a tapestry of plotting, elegantly told, superbly paced. This is a stunning, compelling novel.

The Unsettled is a kind of sequel or companion to Shaw's earlier The Forgotten Coast (Massey, 2021). After he wrote that powerful book about his family history in Taranaki, he began to be contacted by other New Zealanders who wanted to tell their own family histories of benefiting from land confiscated from Māori, and their difficulty in accomodating that into their conscience; or they wanted to express their anger at him for stirring up what they felt was unnecessary hurt form the distant past.