There’s almost nothing better than curling up with a good book in front of the fireplace with a warm cup of cacao. This month we bring you a brilliant selection of titles whose remarkable authors are all presenting at this year’s Auckland Writers Festival.
The Other Way
David Trubridge
This book, a “love letter to the land and sea”, moves from the blinding white light of Antarctica to the fecund darkness of Aotearoa’s fiords and beyond, drawn from Trubridge’s journals and photographs. In a world changed radically by the two traumas of Covid and the climate crisis, the author shows how he has listened to life more simply: in an Italian village café, a Baltic archipelago or, crucially, near his Aotearoa home. It tells of how he has entered into a deeper connection with nature through an immersion of all the senses, beginning with feet on soil, body in the ocean, and breath on a mountaintop.
How To Be A Bad Muslim
Mohammed Hassan
The breakout non-fiction book from award-winning New Zealand writer Mohamed Hassan. From Cairo to Takapuna, Athens to Istanbul, How To Be A Bad Muslim maps the personal and public experience of being Muslim through essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration, and language. Traversing storytelling, memoir, journalism and humour, Hassan speaks authentically and piercingly on mental health, grief, and loss, while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting childhood bullies, listening to lifesaving 90s grunge, and auditioning for vaguely ethnic roles in a certain pirate movie franchise. Funny, chilling, elegiac and eye-opening, this is a must-read from a powerfully talented writer.
Truly Like Lightning
David Duchovny
From the New York Times bestselling author David Duchovny, an epic adventure that asks how we make sense of right and wrong in a world of extremes. David Duchovny’s fourth novel is a heartbreaking meditation on family, religion, sex, greed, human nature, and the vanishing environment of an ancient desert.
The Man Without A Face
Masha Gessen
The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress, making his country a threat to his own people and to the world once more. As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history first-hand, and for The Man Without a Face has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. This account of how a “faceless” man manoeuvred his way into absolute – and absolutely corrupt – power is the definitive biography of Vladimir Putin.
David Trubridge, Mohammed Hassan, Masha Gessen and David Duchovny (via livestream in venue) will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival 23-28 August. For more information and tickets visit writersfestival.co.nz.
