This is a tremendously good memoir, written with great tenderness and compassion, but also imbued with both rage and forgiveness. That's a fine balance, which not every writer could pull of, but Alan Cumming does. He's known as an actor, but I wasn't especially familiar with his work - on TV he's best known for The Good Wife, but he's done a lot of theatrical Shakespeare in the US and the UK.

It's always exciting when a new Murakami appears in English. He casts a kind of spell over the reader like no one else, and you believe in everything that happens to the slightly hapless, indecisive characters in his books, however strange. This one is no different. Tsukuru Tazaki, now 36 and single, has been drifting through his life in Tokyo since his four school friends cut him off without explanation 16 years before. But then he meets Sara, and she encourages him to seek answers, so he finally tries to find out what happened and why.

George Monbiot, the crusading environmental journalist, has recently been attempting to re-engage with nature, to live more lightly on the earth, and to be as close to self-sufficient as possible. This book is at once the story of this attempt, a kind of manifesto, and a scientific speculation about how life in Britain could be. The subtitle is: 'searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding'.

I'd not come across 'urban exploration', or 'urbex', until Robert Macfarlane did a story in The Guardian ( http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/20/urban-exploration-robert-ma... ). I was so intrigued, I picked up a copy of this very striking and fascinating book. Garrett is an American photographer and researcher living in England.

This NZ classic autobiography is a bit hard to track down now, which is a shame; I think it would be worth a reprint. Lee-Johnson finished writing it just before his death in 1993. He was 84. He had grown up in Tuakau in the early part of the 20th Century, then followed his nomadic parents before embarking on a similarly nomadic life himself, characterised by a love of isolation and relative hardship. He lived in a number of places which I have connections with (Tuakau, Piha, Hokianga, Coromandel), which is what drew me to the book.

There's not much I can add to the commentary surrounding this book, other than to say I think Nicky Hager is a national treasure, and that this is a book that needs to be read, regardless of which side of the fence you sit. This is not 'a smear from the left' as it's been described by some, but a well-researched, well-argued book about just how tawdry our politics have become, especially on the right.