Book Watch - Carole Beu

Carole Beu (right) owns and runs The Women’s Bookshop (http://www.womensbookshop.co.nz/) on Auckland’s Ponsonby Rd. These are her top picks from her recent reading:

Most of the books I’ve read lately are advance copies and not available yet so I’m choosing some of my must-reads from 2010.

Room by Emma Donoghue, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, is utterly extraordinary. Through ingenuity and fierce love, an abducted and imprisoned young woman creates a marvellous life for her five-year old son. Told in Jack’s quirky and poignant voice, this is a powerful and inspiring read.

The Hut Builder by the modest New Zealand woman called Laurence Fearnley, is a quiet, reflective novel that vividly evokes the South Island. Boden is a small-town butcher who becomes one of New Zealand’s best known poets. Sir Edmund Hillary Hilary & poet Charles Brasch make appearances in this gentle little gem.

There were three biographies that stood out for me in 2010.

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson And Her Family’s Feuds by acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon is serious academic research with a strong narrative that makes it read like a novel. Emily was NOT the wilting violet she has been made out to be!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is the extraordinary scientific and human story of the poor black woman whose cervical cells, the HeLa cells, have been used for medical research since 1951.

Red Dust Road by renowned poet and short story writer Jackie Kay is a delightfully frank exploration of her origins. Black, Scottish, adopted, lesbian, she travels to Nigeria to find her father and stays with the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This piece first appeared inh the Herald on Sunday, 13 February, 2011