This is a shattering novel of the experience of slavery in America, through the narration of a slave girl, Annis, sold into slavery in New Orleans, and taken to a sugar plantation in Louisiana. It's a very dark book, as it needs to be. It's imbued with almost tangible grief, appallingly true despite being fiction, written in the style of a myth or a legend. Annis has a dignity and a sense of hope, despite the cruelty she suffers every day, and her conversations with spirits lend a mystical edge to the novel. The ending is inevitable, but cryptic.

Signs of Life is a book of linked short stories set in Christchurch around the time of the earthquakes and after. The quakes are in the background of all of these stories, but aren't the main focus - the focus is on the well drawn characters and their interactions. Written in a spare, plain prose style, with finely detailed observations, it's effortlessly readable and thoughtful.

A verse novel, based in part on the author's own experience with traumatic brain injury, this book is a gently, oblique look at slow time and recovery. Set in a rural area, it relates the changing of the seasons, the generations of a family, the restoration of a house, and the slow process of healing. Powerful and insightful.

Baumgartner is a novel about a man in his 70s, whose life has always been defined by his relationship with his much loved wife Anna. Anna has died a few years before the book opens, but Baumgartner is struggling to move on with his life. Finely observed as always with Auster, this is a short, meditative novel, rich with compassion, sadness and optimism. It also boasts a typically Auster cryptic ending.

This is an energetic and powerful tragicomic debut novel, set in Nigeria, which tells the story of 15 year old Andy Aziza, hanging out with his friends, dreaming of white girls, and escape from their miserable lives. It's funny, alive with energy and inventive writing, and also unsettling violence and horror. Andy and his friends finally attempt to travel across the desert, and pay a trafficker to get them across the Mediterranean. The ending is truly shocking...

Far North is a book related to a TV series, which tells the true story of the Ninety Mile Beach drug heist from 2016, in which a shambolic group of loosely connected small time drug dealers attempt to import 500 kg of meth, worth, apparently, up to half a billion dollars. It's a comedy of errors, as they, despite themselves, almost get away with it. It was at the time NZ's biggest ever drug bust.