Jenna is in the midst of a stocktake storm, so phoned into the studio to chat John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do.
When upper middle class couple Kate & Jack's private behaviour is displayed on a hit TV show, there seems to only be one answer - Jack must have had an affair.
This is a rip-roaring page-turner about class, privacy and generational differences. Ultimately, this is a great tale of revenge.
Listen to Jenna’s chat with Rosetta and Milly below.
Nate delves into Vaim by the 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. A strange and intriguing journey!
Listen to his chat with Milly & Rosetta below.
Party Boy is a Dunedin-based fever dream delving into the life of Marco, whose nerves are on the slow boil. A story of masculinity, trauma, memory, interruptions, and food.
Read Talia Marshall’s piece on Newsroom’s Reading Room here.
See Breton Dukes in these Auckland Writers Festival events.
Jenna called into the bFM studio to chat to Rosetta and Milly about Party Boy, listen below.
On RNZ’s Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan, Jenna spoke about Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This is Where the Serpent Lives.
Set in Pakistan over 50 years, post-Partitian, Serpent hosts a wide range of characters demonstrating a deeply ingrained feudal class structure that appears not to be able to be shaken.
Vividly told - in descriptions of place, expertly weaved characters and symbols of betrayal and culturally rich, this is an epically told fable, full of corruption, that leads to a truly electrifying final 50 pages. Great for readers who have recently enjoyed Kiran Desai’s Sonia & Sunny or Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road.
Set over 50 years, This is Where the Serpent Lives is a collection of four linked stories exploring class in Pakistan. This book feels epic, yet is intimately told with each story leading to an explosive and powerful ending.
Nate also delves into the Ockhams shortlist and continues our excitement for the release of the Auckland Writers Festival programme - out this Wednesday 11th.
Listen to his chat with Milly & Rosetta below.
Jenna popped into the 95bFM studio today to chat about Elisabeth AKA Nurse Carla Easther’s debut novel, Seed. A character driven novel full of clever quips, holding humour alongside the heartache whilst capturing the lottery of fertility and the tension this can cause between friends.
Jenna also had a bunch of book news:
The International Booker longlist, specifically mentioning Women Without Men by Shahrnush Pasipur.
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist being released this Wednesday, 4th March.
The Auckland Writers Festival Programme is being announced next week.
She also should have mentioned that the Women’s Prize longlist is also out this week. Phew!
Listen to the kōrero with Jenna, Milly & Sam below:
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TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
Nate is up in studio chatting with Rosetta and Milly with a local pick from Te Herenga Waka University Press. Kate Camp revisits her 1986 diary in Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, responding to the daily entries written when she was a Wellington teenager.
Listen below for Nate’s thoughts.
Leila Mottley was 19 when her debut novel, Nightcrawling, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She returns with The Girls Who Grew Big, a story set in Florida following three teen mothers. Visceral and rich language makes for an excellent story.
Jenna phoned into the studio with Rosetta and Milly. Listen below!
Nate is back up for Loose Reads, and today we're getting deep into questions of morality and mortality, with George Saunders' Vigil.
Listen to Nate chat with Rosetta and Milly below.
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TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
Sean is a 48 year old poet, writer and reluctant bookseller, “A flaneur in utopia, with nowhere to flan”, in John Tottenham’s Service.
This is a book that dives into the perils and repetition of customer service, the writing process and the dreary reality of gentrification.
Think of this as Black Books set in LA.
Listen to Jenna, Rosetta and Milly below!
We're making up for Auckland Anniversary day with a special Thursday Loose Reads!
Nate chats about the newly announced Ockham Book Awards Longlist, and one of his top picks from the list: Tracy Farr's Wonderland.
Listen below:
Today on RNZ’s Nine to Noon, Jenna chatted with Kathryn about three of her 2025 highlights: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978 - 1998, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And his Mother) by Rabih Alameddine.
Listen below!
Jenna visited the 95bFM studio this morning to talk about Rejection, a book that Jia Tolentino says is “a thrill for the sickos among us.”
A dive into the darkest crevices of the internet and internet culture, this book is self aware, outrageous and outrageously funny.
Listen to Jenna’s chat with Milly and Rosetta below. We also mention Bread of Angels by Patti Smith.
by Nate Carroll
There’s no rest for a bookseller! As one year of amazing reading ends it’s time to look ahead to the next and already 2026 looks to be an exciting one for books. There’s some heavy hitters already announced for the start of the year- starting with Vigil in early February , George Saunders’ first novel since his sensational Man Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo. I’m particularly excited about Glyph from my all time favourite author Ali Smith, the second in her dystopian duology. Expect a story equal parts playful and profound. An author who seems to need no rest at all is Elizabeth Strout, whose next book The Things We Never Say publishes in May. March is a treat for those who like their fiction to get under their skin and unsettle; we have Lauren Groff’s latest collection Brawler and Asako Yuzuki’s (of Butter fame) second novel Hooked. Two great novelists, Sebastian Barry and Colson Whitehead, enter third novels into loosely expanding universes, with The Newer World and Cool Machine, while Booker winner Yann Martel returns at the end of March with the ambitious Son of Nobody. Booker shortlisted author, John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do is out in March. Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction, looks especially intriguing. Levy is one of our great novelists and her writing on art is equally as good- this new novel, which looks to combine the two, promises to be Levy at her lofty best. Perhaps the two biggest literary releases of the year will come a little later, with Maggie O'Farrell's Land and Ann Patchett's Whistler both publishing in June.
On the New Zealand front, two of our very best writers are publishing new books early in the year. After her landmark memoir The Mirror Book, Charlotte Grimshaw returns to fiction with The Black Monk in March. Elizabeth Knox publishes her first memoir in April with Night, Ma, reflections on a three year period marked by a series of calamities to the people closest to her. Knox is such a creative and sensitive writer - an invitation into her head is not to be missed. Similarly, I’m intrigued by Kate Camp's Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, wherein one of our best poets responds to her fourteen year old self's diary. We’re also very excited for debut novels by two longtime members of our wider Time Out community, with Elisabeth Easther’s Seed and Karen Holdom’s The End and the Beginning.
A memoir which I’m lucky enough to have already read is Ghost Stories by Booker longlisted writer Siri Hustvedt, centered on the death of her husband, Paul Auster. Her writing on love, absence and grief is remarkable and so too are the small sections of Auster’s final writing- letters to their 1 year old grandson, written after he knew his cancer was terminal. Not an easy read but one with tremendous power. One of the most anticipated books of the year is Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn To Life: Shame has to Change Sides, the first biography from one of our most courageous modern figures. The other major early year release is Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, new book London Falling. He’s the modern master of non-fiction writing and this new book sounds typical to type- an investigation into the death of a young man which spawns a host of new questions for each single answer.
Two debut novels we’re keeping a close eye on at Time Out are The Bodybuilders by Albertine Clarke and Whidbey by T Kira Madden. I’ve read an early review copy of Whidbey and immediately picked it as a book which could make some noise. In it, a woman meets a stranger and tells him about the man who abused her as a child, and the stranger offers to kill the man and then disappear. From there a constantly shifting narrative unspools, that reads like a cross between A Little Life and a Patricia Highsmith novel. The Bodybuilders is a speculative fiction novel that frays at the border between the body and the mind. All I needed to see was the early review ‘If Phillip K Dick had written the Bell Jar’ to be instantly curious.
I’d be remiss not to mention some excellent global fiction being published in English this year. The On the Calculation of Volume series which has so gripped the literary scene (and our local Time Out one) continues, with its 4th and 5th entries set to come in 2026. The great Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrigue publishes Now I Surrender in the second half of the year and Time Out favourite Elisa Dusapin has a new book The Old Fire out in March. One of my favourite writers around, Vigdis Hjorth, also has a new translation of her book Repetition, wherein a seemingly innocuous memory inspires a dark realisation.
All these and many more great books to come in 2026 - including Jennette McCurdy (late January), Colm Toibin (April) and Min Jin Lee (September).
Nate visited the bFM studio for our first review of 2026.
A monumental novel, twenty years in the making, Helm traces humanities connection with a Cumbrian wind of that same name, Ranging from the modern day to Celtic England, it shows how humans have always been shaped by nature, and the irreversible loss we risk by upsetting a long held balance.
Hall has always been a magnificent prose writer and she finds perhaps her greatest achievement here in the personified voice of Helm (the wind). Playful, aloof, alien and constantly changing.
Listen to the full review below with Milly:
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TOP 5 BOOKS
KID'S BOOKS
On her last Loose Reads ever, Suri talks all things Time Out and all things books! Listen in for a brief history of her stint at Loose Reads, her favourite books of 2025, predictions for book trends in 2026 and a little love letter to the bookshop that started it all.
Listen below to Suri with Rosetta and Milly.
Jenna visited the 95bFM studio for the last time in 2025. She plotted together some book recommendations for Christmas with Rosetta and Milly. Listen below!
FOR FANS OF TIM WINTON’S JUICE
Flesh by David Szalay
THE UP-TO-DATE LIT READER
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing
Helm by Sarah Hall
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and his Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
ROMANCE READER
Heart the Lover by Lily King
A TRAVEL BOOK
Michael Palin in Venezuela
FOR FANS OF KALIANE BRADLEY’S THE MINISTRY OF TIME
Moderation by Elaine Castillo
MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
Mana by Tāme Iti
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith
Night People by Mark Ronson
Chris Knox - Not Given Lightly by Craig Robertson
