Nate
Nate reviews Christian Kracht’s unique and stylish latest novel Air. A jigsaw of a novel, it alternates between a designer desperately searching for authenticity in our contemporary period and a daring fantasy adventure of two people fleeing from an evil duke. The stories, seemingly utterly disparate, start to converge, as Kracht pulls off something daring and enduringly hopeful.
Listen to his chat with Milly below!
Nate visited the temporary 95bFM studio to talk about this year’s 2026 International Booker winner, Taiwan Travelogue. This was translated by Lin King.
A romance of longing between two women that captures a bond brought together by colonialism and imperialism - and food.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award.
Listen to Nate’s chat below with Rosetta and Milly.
On this morning’s Loose Reads review, Nate talks about Saleem Haddad’s Floodlines, which he declares is his favourite book of 2026 so far.
An illuminating Iraqi-British family saga that captures art, journalism, diaspora and politics that moves skillfully between past and present.
Listen to Nate’s chat below with Rosetta and Milly.
Nate reviewed The Shadow of the Object on bFM this week, the latest by Mexican American author Chloe Aridjis. It's an eerie, moody novel that confronts various fragmentations of reality, very much in the spirit of Kafka.
Listen to his chat with Rosetta below:
Nate visited the bFM studio to talk about author, actress and director Pirkko Saisio’s Lowest Common Denomonator and Backlight, with The Red Book of Farewells due in August.
Translated by Mia Spangenberg, this auto-fiction trilogy was orgiinally published in Finnish between 1998-2003.
For fans of Elena Ferrante, these books are Finnish classics.
Listen below!
Nate debriefs the week that was - including the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards & Auckland Writers Festival events such as Patrick Radden Keefe, Elizabeth Knox, Maria Reva & more.
Listen below!
Levy's latest novel takes the reader on a ridiculously entertaining journey through past and present Paris. Our narrator is attempting to write a biography of the great 20th century modernist writer Gertrude Stein and the book turns and swivels between these two perspectives; looking at the ideas and art that formed the modernist revolution and the uncertainties of our contemporary period. If this all sounds a bit heavy don't let that put you off- Levy expertly combines her ideas with sharply drawn characters and a search through the streets of Paris for a cat named 'It'. Ultimately, this is a book that examines how we construct our worlds, both interior and exterior, written with all of Levy's considerable intelligence and skill.
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Paradiso 17 is Nate’s picks of the bunch.
The book follows the entirety of Sufien’s deeply melancholic life as he looks for home after being displaced from his home in Palestine in 1948.
A lyrical read, where every line is beautiful and a strong sense of place is evoked. The book is based on the life of the author’s father.
Listen to his chat with Milly & Rosetta below. The Women’s Prize for Fiction’s shortlist is out this week!
Ali Smith is Nate’s favourite author and this latest novel, a spiritual companion to her previous Gliff, is another triumph. Her writing is as lyrical, cutting and darkly comedic as ever- with Glyph perhaps her most overtly political yet. Through the relationship between two sisters Smith examines what it means to live in a world of rising violence and growing right-wing extremism.
Listen to his chat with Milly & Rosetta 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Nate reviewed Olivia Laing's The Silver Book, a new Time Out staff favourite. A beguiling story set in the world of 1970’s Italian cinema, it examines the thin line between art and reality - as well as the destructive power that hides in our societal systems. The perfect book for that arty friend that you never know how to buy for!
Listen to the full review below with Milly & Rosetta.
Nate went into BFM to talk about Eimear McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face. Weird, wonderful and full of emotional heft- a perfect portrait of a faltering romantic relationship.
Listen to the full review below with Milly & Rosetta.
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.
By Nate
On opening Twist the new novel by Colum McCann (author of Time Out favourite Apeirogon) I didn’t quite know what to expect; all I knew was that the plot seemed to be centred on the repairing of an underwater internet cable. To say the least, that is not a subject one often reads about. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find in Twist a deeply introspective novel on human connection- how it forms and fails.
Twist is a deeply internal novel, the events solely being viewed through the eyes of Fennel, a failing middle-aged writer who is asked to write a magazine article on the boats that repair the world's underwater cable network. Fennel flies out to South Africa to board one of these boats and report on the work that goes on to keep the world connected. It appears an easy job, a simple and crowd pleasing article with an obvious narrative. However, on meeting Conway, the enigmatic and mysterious ship captain, a far more alluring story begins to form. In truth, the novel is more interesting off the boat, which McCann recognises. While the underwater cables maintain the framework of the novel, it is Fennel’s relationship with Conway and the strange currents that swirl around him that are the true focus. As a character he is always something of a cipher; appearing both friendly and distant, steady and uncontrolled, cynical and introspective. I find that these types of characters can appear frustrating in fiction, that their role as an object of fascination can make them feel thin, and the eventual payoff not worthy of the attention given to it. McCann avoids this pitfall, partly through Fennels function as an unreliable narrator; it is never clear, even to himself, how much of his view of Conway is internal projection and how much is earnt.
This is a difficult review to write, as so much of Twist relies on uncertainty- we are meant to unveil the curtain of Conway's life as Fennel does. However, at heart Twist is a novel about the relationships that connect us; how valuable and vulnerable they truly are.
