Jenna visited the 95bFM studio this morning to delve into the Booker shortlist.
Flesh by David Szalay
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Audition by Katie Kitamura
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Then, we chat about our upcoming activities for NZ Bookshop Day, Saturday 11th October.
This morning, Suri reviewed the newest book by one of Time Out’s favourite authors and the winner of both the Nobel Prize in Literature and International Booker Prize, Olga Tokarczuk.
House of Day, House of Night delves into life onto a remote Polish village. A fragmented mosiac of fiction, mythology & collective consicousness. This book is in a constant diagloue, asking the question of how we and our dreams are shaped by the natural world.
Suri called into the studio this morning to chat to Rosetta & Milly. Listen below!
Jenna called into the RNZ studio to talk about Booker longlisted, Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood.
Set in a seaside town, in 1960’s England, a teenage shrimp scraper dreams of a life outside of his grueling work. When a film director comes to town, his world suddenly opens up.
This is a tightly written narrative. Immersive, insular, timeless modern classic that explores asperation vs. duty. A hot contender for the Booker shortlist!
I kōrero a Jenna rātou ko Milly, Ko Rosetta i a Te Kōrero o Tōku Reo nā Mike McRoberts mō Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori. Whakaronga mai!
Nate visits 95bFM for his first ever radio review! Today, he brings in the brand new release, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy.
A memoir exploring mother/daughter dynamics, Indian politics and what is likely to be a foundation for the storyline of The God of Small Things, this book will be one of Nate’s favourite reads of the year.
Listen to the full review below with Milly & Rosetta.
Click on the covers to shop!
TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
For our first day of spring, Jenna brought Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel, Vera, or Faith into the studio.
A story of an anxious ten year old trying to keep it together as her family, friend and school life are in disarray. Set in a not-too distant future America; recognisable advances in AI and political control also affect Vera’s outer life.
Shteyngart wrote this book in just two months. It’s charmingly funny, sad and is a clear comment on the American Dream.
Listen to the full review below with Milly & Rosetta.
The future had been a luxury, the future didn’t exist anymore.
This Booker longlisted first novel of Ukrainian-Canadian writer, Maria Reva, is a 2025 favourite of the Time Out team. What starts as a comical tale of snail conservation with a romance industry kidnapping plot, the linear narrative is upended with Russa’s invasion into Ukraine. Reva inserts herself into the narrative, crumbling the fourth wall, to question identity, hope and the role of creativity at a time of war.
Endling is filled with witty humour, whilst maintaining wisdom. Listen to Suri’s review with Milly & Rosetta below.
On this week’s Loose Reads, Jenna delves into Wendy Erskine’s first novel, The Benefactors. An assault rocks four Belfast families, where the class & privilege of the three perpetrators’ mothers collide with the street smarts of the victim’s family.
Richly drawn & nuanced characters with bitingly funny dialogue and a surprising amount of heart, The Benefactors is a book about leveraging the power you have.
Listen to the full review below with Milly & Rosetta.
America and it's writers have a long-time fascination with psychoanalysis. From Joan Didion's hard-nosed accounts of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking; Blue Nights) to Toni Morrison's exceptional exploration of the psychological toll of motherhood under oppression (Beloved) and post-9/11 authors like Franzen and Safran-Foer elucidating marriage and family life in a new millenia, the impacts of institutional changes on relationships and psychology have underpinned the American canon.
Hal Ebbott's Among Friends continues this tradition, charting the fractious, changing relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and- central to the novel- frenemies. Amos and Emerson are college friends tethered by a competitive friendship, a competitiveness that simmers quietly beneath their intertwined family lives. Over the course of a weekend getaway, tensions rise to the surface, ending in a shocking act that will change these relationships forever.
This is a novel that creeps along quietly; an ebb and flow of drama and relationship tics that crescendo into a powerful ending- when the truth is unleashed, all that's left in its wake is shrapnel.
Who will survive the ruin?
A compelling read for fans of Rachel Cusk's Second Place or Franzen's The Corrections.
It’s been a week of book news!
First, Jenna delves into the Booker longlist. She then mentions Gareth Shute’s new music book, Songs from the Shaky Isles (including an event this Friday 8th August) and chats an upcoming event with Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine.
From there, we chat this week’s book. Jenna has brought in Neil Blackmore’s Objects of Desire. An entertaining romp through mid-century literature and literary characters through the eyes of a grifter who is caught between love and reputation. It’s funny, campy, bitchy and features fictional portrayals of well known writers such as James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal.
Listen to Jenna, Rosetta and Milly below!
Click on the covers to shop!
TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
Edward St Aubyn returns to his characters from Double Blind (2021) in his latest novel, Parallel Lines.
The novel opens with the stories of Sebastian and Olivia; twins who are separated at birth and experience vastly different upbringings- Olivia enjoys the comforts of upper middle-class life, whilst Sebastian, thrown into foster care from birth, is surviving life in an institution after a schizophrenic episode.
Foisted into the lives of Sebastian and Olivia are Martin (Olivia's father and Sebastian's current psychotherapist) and his wife Lizzie- both psychoanalysts and scholars of Lacan. As each character strives to make sense of their identity in a glib world on the brink of ecological and civilisational collapse, St Aubyn weaves their lives into a broader story of humanity: the biological and environmental factors that shape us and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Through rigorous psychoanalysis and detailed plotting, Edward St Aubyn hides philosophical truths about human and nature's interconnectedness in an age of atomisation, in a sharp, coyly funny family drama.
Although Parallel Lines continues the journeys of characters from his previous novel, it can be read as a stand-alone story.
Jenna was in the bFM studio with Rosetta & Milly this morning, chatting Susan Choi’s Flashlight.
This is a richly written novel that is an expansive character study following a father, mother and daughter whilst moving between Japan, America and Korea. It’s about identity and secrets - from others and oneself.
This is for fans of Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, Pachinko, Franzen and perhaps even The Bee Sting!
Listen below:
Jenna chatted to Kathryn about Maria Reva’s Endling. This starts as an innocent narrative about snails, Ukraine’s romance tourism industry and a kidnapping. However, the Russian invasion explodes the novel’s structure; asking the question, how can one write and create art in a time of war?
This novel is genuinely funny, it’s adventurous, it’s sad. It’s meta. It asks the big questions. What are art and love in a time of tragedy? How can we have hope? And perhaps Reva gives that in the form of a left swirling snail.
Today we welcome new 95bFM Breakfast hosts, Rosetta and Milly!
Mary McCarthy (author of The Group and The Company She Keeps) recounts her changing relationship to Catholicism in this darkly funny, punchy memoir.
Newly published as part of Fitzcarraldo's non-fiction collection, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood chronicles the life of an American girlhood steeped in Irish-Catholic Orthodoxy.
When her parents die young, Mary McCarthy and her three siblings are taken under the care of her disciplinarian Irish grandmother and later, her uncle and aunts.
From having mouths taped to prevent 'mouth-breathing', to having castor oil snuck into their juice, the McCarthy kids endure the sting of orthodox upbringing and Mary finds herself questioning her relationship to God.
A bolshy, sharp memoir that explores religion, the messiness of womanhood and finding meaning in post-religious life.
Examining the changing structure of religious hierarchy and class in America, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood offers a spiky taste of America in the 1960s.
Sunstruck is a searing read that makes you feel like you’re roasting in a European summer. Starting with a Saltburn-esque premise, Hunter’s characters move beyond a French chateau into London.
Exploring themes of masculinity, desire, power, class and sexuality, Sunstruck is great debut to add to the pile.
Sunstruck is the winner of the #Merky prize, which is Stormy’s imprint with Penguin.
Jenna with guest breakfast host Sam in the studio, listen to the full review below!
Click on the covers to shop!
TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
Suri delves into Yiyun Li’s memoir of grief after the tragic death of both of her sons. This one is a tear jerker.
She visited Milly and Tuva’a in the studio - listen below!
We Do Not Part, is Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s latest novel. It starts with a curious premise: A woman, Kyungha, sets on a mission from Seoul to Jeju island on behalf of her artist friend, Inseon, who has badly cut her hand in an accident. The task is to feed her bird Ama before it dies.
A poetic and political novel, We Do Not Part ultimately traverses trauma, loss, reparations and the desperate need not to forget the past.
Jenna buzzed through to breakfast hosts Milly and Tuva'a in the studio to discuss. Listen below.
