NZ Book Month was postponed indefinitely this year. So the wonderful Rachael King, author and Literary Director of the WORDChristchurch (Books & Writers’) Festival, kicked off the #NZBookMonthMay tag on Twitter, determined to celebrate NZ literature, readers and writers, regardless.

I “got in behind”, to use Kiwi parlance, by tweeting a speculative fiction publication—some current, some classic—by a NZ author every day throughout the month. I was also pretty sure I could get through the month without once repeating an author—and the list below proves my supposition was quite right. 😉

So here, now, is the full and unabridged list for May, from 1 through 31, of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror publications by NZ authors:

May 1:

Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck (Fantasy)
.
.

May 2:

Margaret Mahy, The Changeover (YA; Fantasy)
.
.
.

May 3:

Editors Mark Pirie & Tim Jones, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry From New Zealand (Poetry Anthology; Science Fiction)
.

Monday 4:

Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Magic Realism)
.

Tuesday 5:

Russell Kirkpatrick, Across the Face of the World (Epic Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 6:

Karen Healey, Guardian Of The Dead (Fantasy; YA)
.

Thursday 7:

Tina Makereti, Once Upon A Time In Aotearoa (Fantasy; Short Story collection)
.

Friday 8:

Adam Christopher, Seven Wonders (Superhero Science Fiction)
.

Saturday 9:

Jane Higgins, The Bridge (Alternate dystopia; YA)
.

Sunday 10:

Fredrik Brounéous The Prince Of Soul And The Lighthouse (Fantasy; YA)
.

Monday 11:

Rachael King, Red Rocks (Junior fiction; Urban Fantasy)
.

Tuesday 12:

Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (Magic Realism)
.

Wednesday 13:

Bernard Beckett, Genesis (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Thursday 14:

Fleur Beale, Juno Of Taris (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Friday 15:

Philip Mann, The Disestablishment Of Paradise (Science Fiction)
.

Saturday 16:

editors Cassie Hart & Anna Caro, Tales for Canterbury (Speculative Fiction; short story collection)
.

Sunday 17:

Brian Falkner, Assault (Junior; Military Science Fiction)
.

Monday 18:

Juliet Marillier, Prickle Moon (Short Fiction Anthology; Fantasy)
.

Tuesday 19:

James Norcliffe, The Loblolly Boy (Junior Fiction; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 20:

Freya Robertson, Heartwood (Epic Fantasy)
.

Thursday 21:

Kelly Ana Moray, Bloom (Magical Realism)
.

Friday 22:

Nalini Singh, Angel’s Blood (Paranormal Urban Romance)
.

Saturday 23:

David Hair, The Bone Tiki (YA; Fantasy)
.

Sunday 24:

Philippa Ballantine, Geist (Fantasy)
.

Monday 25:

Rachel Craw, Spark (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Tuesday 26:

Anna Mackenzie, Cattra’s Legacy (YA; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 27:

Debbie & Matt Cowens, Mansfield With Monsters (Mashup; Fantasy)
.

Thursday 28:

RL Stedman, A Necklace of Souls (YA; Fantasy)
.

Friday 29:

Anna Smaill, The Chimes (Fantasy)
.

Saturday 30:

Maurice Gee, Under The Mountain (Junior; Fantasy)
.

Sunday 31:

Helen Lowe, The Heir of Night (Epic; Fantasy)

—

I know I still haven’t included everyone, but this is still a very respectable array and one that I believe proves NZ speculative fiction writing is vibrant and an area to be proud of within the overall NZ literary scene.

Yup, five years ago today, on May 31 1020, I posted my very first post here “…on Anything, Really.”

Since then I have published a grand total of 1881 posts and I think I have largely kept to the undertaking I made that day to post:

“…about both novels and poetry, what’s coming up and what’s happening—and I hope there’ll be a few online interviews showing up here! … I’m looking forward to having conversations around what I’m reading now, the books I’ve loved reading in the past as well as creative influences from other areas.”

During the past 5 years I’ve also:

• published another two books, The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost;
• had some fun with the Gemmell Awards, winning the Morningstar in 2012 and being shortlisted for the Legend in 2013;
• participated in two Christchurch Writers’ Festivals;
• been to the 2010 Worldcon in Melbourne and several NZ Natcons;
• hosted lots of other authors and poets here in 1 form or another, e.g through interviews, guest posts, and the Tuesday Poem;
• and hosted Rebecca Fisher’s wonderful Big Worlds on Small Screens column;
• not to mention having lived through the 18 months of Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath, which is still ongoing (am hoping to find out whether the house is a repair or a rebuild in the next few weeks);

On May 31 2010 I also mentioned “having a little cat buddy who likes to have his share in the conversations.” Sadly, I also got to bid farewell to my bud, also here on the blog, in October 2013.

I enjoy blogging and also feeling like I’m getting to know (as much as one can, through this form of interaction) those of you who comment. And I certainly appreciate all those who follow the blog, because I know a lot of you are dropping by  and reading very regularly.

I’m not quite sure what the future brings, but for now I’m raising my virtual glass to you all and five years on “…Anything, Really” — but mainly on books, writing, and their many permutations.

As you know, I’ve been on a  ‘mission’ to celebrate a NZ Speculative Fiction book every day on Twitter for #NZBookMonthMay without repeating an author, even though some have considerably more than one book to their name.

I am very pleased to say that I am wrapping up Week 4 and the month (tomorrow) without failing in that aim. 🙂

Here’s the roundup for this final week:

Monday 25:

Rachel Craw, Spark (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Tuesday 26:

Anna Mackenzie, Cattra’s Legacy (YA; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 27:

Debbie & Matt Cowens, Mansfield With Monsters (Mashup; Fantasy)
.

Thursday 28:

RL Stedman, A Necklace of Souls (YA; Fantasy)
.

Friday 29:

Anna Smaill, The Chimes (Fantasy)
.

Saturday 30:

Maurice Gee, Under The Mountain (Junior; Fantasy)
.

And anticipating tomorrow, I thought I probably should finish up by including one of my own books. As I’ve done with others authors, I’ll reference a first-in-series. (Of course, Thornspell could turn out to be part of a series, but it’s all Wall Of Night for now. 😉 )
.

Sunday 31:

Helen Lowe, The Heir of Night (Epic; Fantasy)

—

Look out on Monday for the whole NZ Book Month May array of speculative fiction goodness.

Coming up tomorrow: the 5th anniversary of the blog.

Last week, my Fantasy Heroines That Rock My World series on SF Signal featured Dianora from Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana.

Slightly over a year ago now, I let you all in on a secret: I Simply Adore Reading! Not only because “I love stories and storytelling”, but also because I love “revelling in the gorgeousness of some writers’ way with words.”

In order to prepare the Dianora post,  I reread Tigana for the first time in some years — and revelled all over again in the gorgeousness of Guy Gavriel Kay’s words:

“The two men were both gazing into the flames while all around them there was already a purposeful stir and bustle in the kitchen…In their silent gravity they seemed to him to be a part of a frieze, a tableau, emblematic in some complex way of all such predawn hours for those on the long road. Neither man was a stranger to this hour, Devin knew, to sitting before a castle’s kitchen fire among the servants in the last dark hour before dawn, easing into wakefulness and a fugitive warmth, preparing for the road again and whatever turnings it might offer in the day that had not yet begun.”

I love the way he builds a picture that gives a sense of both world and characters, of events turning on a moment or an hour, and the emotional ebb and flow beneath them.

Of course, I didn’t actually go to the Auckland Writers’ Festival, but my local Christchurch City Libraries sent a team who obligingly put together a list of quotes.

This is my absolute favourite from their list — and no surprises at all (for me, anyway) that it’s from Haruki Murakami. Everytime he is interviewed about his work, I find a new quote to ‘heart.’

Here’s the most recent:

“My stories are always unpredictable to myself.”~ Haruki Murakami

Oh yes, I thought — although I would probably have said that my stories are always mysterious to myself.

They definitely work in their own mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. And are not infrequently shapeshifters to boot — just when you think you’ve got them tied down, there they go, shifting again: not unlike Menelaus and the Old Man of the Sea…

As I said in my March guest spot with Gillian Polack, I would counsel anyone having dealings in the Realm of Story to “retain a cool head, invest in robust footwear, a compass (since both maps and GPS oft prove fickle in the writing realm), and a butterfly net…”

The better to catch that errant, shapeshifting tale, of course!

To read the Christchurch Libraries’ team’s full report on Haruki Murakami’s festival session click on:

Keep Calm and Read Haruki Murakami

Introduction:

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Anna Smaill, whose debut novel The Chimes has been published internationally (2015) to critical praise. As I noted on Monday, it has one of the more fascinating—and I believe, original—world-building premises that I have encountered in recent years. So I am very pleased to be able to discuss the book in more depth with Anna now.

—

Interview:

Helen: Welcome to “…on Anything, Really”, Anna. I’m really keen to focus our time together specifically on The Chimes, so how would you describe the “big idea” that drives the story?

Anna: What I really wanted the book to explore was what happens to us if we lose the ability to tell stories – or if we seek to answer the question ‘who are we?’ with a single, monolithic answer. It’s also, in a related way, about what happens when we seek a pure form of expression. After all, all forms of communication are messy – you can’t ultimately control how others receive or interpret your words or thoughts. That mess, that difference, is where meaning gets built, where language itself comes from. I was also fascinated by the way music moves through time in such a different way to fiction and to narrative.

Helen: I would like to explore that last point more, if you don’t mind. How do you see music moving through time differently to fiction and narrative?

Anna: I guess I’m thinking a lot here about the experience of performing music. As a musician you spend a very long time preparing, practising a piece of music, but the performance itself is fleeting, momentary and immediate – the musician’s moment of performance is exactly synchronised with the audience’s moment of experience. There’s a kind of relentless, inescapable immediacy in music, in the way it’s inscribed in time. The irony of course is that it can take you to a place which seems to transcend time. On the other hand, I think writing often does its best to stretch and evade the experience of time. And although a story might follow a roughly chronological, linear movement, the process of composing narrative is often far more organic: the events can be moved round, reconsidered, edited. The reader might either read the work straight through in one sitting, or in a few chapters each evening over a week; he or she might choose to flick back and reread a preceding section before plowing forward. There is a gentler, less physically demanding entry into the different aesthetic time zone.

Helen: So how long had the idea for The Chimes been with you before you began writing?

Anna: While I was writing my PhD in London I was toying with an idea for a book about a musical elite, a group who occupy a sort of rarefied intellectual and aesthetic space removed from worldly concerns and the hubbub of normal society. The world was essentially benign, rational, idealised – a bit like Plato’s Republic, or the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels. However, gradually the cracks would begin to show. The action was to take place internally, though – from the point of view of one of the people within this world. I think it was essentially a YA book I had imagined. Then I had the rather amazing experience of being ambushed by the voice of the character who would become Simon. I heard his voice, and saw – or felt, rather – the world he was speaking from, which was one of deprivation, darkness and fear. It took me a few days to realise that the two worlds were one and the same.

Helen: Simon is certainly an engaging character, but the story centers on both him and another character, Lucien. As the author, what matters to you about these characters?

Anna: Simon was incredibly important to me as a sort of everyman figure. He’s an observer – he reflects and watches and pieces things together. And he is also, I think, very much a writer, and thus perhaps a surrogate for me as a writer, in that he often feels almost invisible, transparent. There’s a passage in the book where he tries and fails to supply a description of his own appearance. It was a constant relief that I could feel affectionate towards Simon – because there was the risk that if he came too close to my own experience, or mindset, he would irritate me. It was also important to me that Simon was humane. He’s somebody who has remained detached from others through necessity, but I wanted to show that his emotional world expanded with his ability to remember, his ability to put words to his experiences. Lucien on the other hand is a figure of glamour in many ways. He is cocky, surefooted, flippant, a leader who, while he doesn’t believe in the things he is pursuing, nevertheless believes completely in the act of pursuit. He is someone who inspires love, so he was tricky to write. In a way, I had to fall in love with Lucien to write him.

Helen: I’m interested that you felt Lucien doesn’t believe in the things he is pursuing. Do you mean his quest with Simon, or in some other way? And how did it feel for you as author, the process of falling in love with a character?

Anna: I mean in his daily life as a member of the pact. He prospects for palladium – the metal which is the group’s livelihood – and sells it back to the Order. Yet of course he knows that in doing so he’s shoring up and perpetuating the Order’s power. He is essentially biding his time while living by their rules. It’s a contradiction in his personality that he still relishes the hunt in the underground tunnels. It’s a semi-religious pursuit for him, and one full of risk and bravado. If he didn’t believe in it, he couldn’t be the leader that he is. I think the way I felt towards Lucien closely mirrored Simon’s feelings. As a character he was, at first, unknowable and strange, and I was compelled by and probably a little wary of him. There was a pivotal moment when I realised that Lucien is also vulnerable, that he relies on Simon deeply. It’s probably more accurate to say that I fell in love with Simon and Lucien’s relationship. It took me a long while into the writing to realise that Simon was in love with Lucien. I don’t know why I was so slow: in hindsight it was fairly obvious all along.

Helen: Was it important to the story that both your lead characters are male? What did that bring to The Chimes that two women characters, for example, would not?

Anna: That’s an excellent question. When I first started writing the book, or the earlier version with the idea I discussed above, the narrative voice was actually that of Sonja, Lucien’s sister. However, as I mentioned earlier, I heard Simon’s voice – a male voice, as it happened – and it was so strong, so insistent, that there was no question in my mind that it was his story. I didn’t feel that I made a decision about his sex or gender any more than you do the sex or gender of your child. Interestingly, Simon’s gender is not overtly “masculine” in any stereotypical fashion. He felt, as I said, very much like a version of me – a younger me. And I suppose this reflects the fact that as a girl growing up (and I think a lot of girls do this) I was essentially gender neutral in the way I identified myself with the characters of the books I was reading. I didn’t just identify with female characters, but projected myself into the most heroic or interesting character, regardless of whether they were male or female. However, there’s another discussion to be had there, I realise. The majority of books I read as a child and young adult had a male hero, so I do wonder, and can’t rule out the possibility that I’ve internalised this in some way. It’s something I am far more conscious of as I begin my next book.

Helen: The Chimes is essentially post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. What are the elements you consider important to pulling off a speculative story of this kind?

Anna: I think you need to commit to the reimagination of the world from the ground up. For me this was less about having a perfectly calibrated backstory (though of course, I tried to make the logical facts of the world hold true) but to be able to see the locations, and to feel the texture of the world. I wanted to really inhabit and communicate its colours and smells and, of course sounds. Probably most crucial, though, was to convey how the constraints of this world shaped the inhabitants’ consciousness. How do our thought patterns and vocabulary change if we lose our short-term memory? So many of the words that are built into our language rely on the ability to reflect over time, to build up knowledge – abstraction in itself requires the ability to extrapolate from past experience. So, I tried to make the world very concrete, very sensory, and the vocab had to feel flexible, a bit broken, ad hoc and improvisatory. That was where the compound words came in. Simon, the narrator, doesn’t have that many categories for description – so he combines words to enrich his portrayal of the world. I knew that to really pull off the somewhat radical ideas I was playing with, I had to push myself into Simon’s viewpoint in a very physical way.

Helen: While memory is an important element of the story, I would like to return to music, which informs The Chimes at every level. Are there any particular pieces that you associate with either different parts of the book or specific characters?

Anna: The firelit world of the storehouse was synonymous to me with the experience of lying in bed as a child and listening to my father playing the piano down the hall. He used to play Bach preludes and fugues from Books I and II of The Well-Tempered Klavier, and these are a sort of memory background for the book as a whole. When Simon first “auditions” for Lucien’s pact, the song is also one that’s associated with my father. Alongside the Bach and Beethoven, he used to sing a lot of Irish ballads and folk songs – songs in which music and narrative really work together. That audition melody is a riff on ‘The Black Velvet Band’, which had a story that used to both delight and horrify me as a child. There are also pop songs that capture the emotional texture of the world in some hard to explain way. At the time of writing my husband had just bought a turntable, so a lot of our London weekends seemed to involve the hunt for vinyl. We randomly bought a copy of the album The Pacific Age by the new wave group Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark, whom at the time I had never heard of. I listened to one track ‘The Dead Girls’ over and over. It is the perfect new romantic single – swelling, lush, superheated symphonic emotion. And the lyrics are wonderful. There is a passage in the book that probably directly stems from that song. Lorde’s The Love Club EP is the soundtrack to editing the novel. I had come to it late, and there was something so audacious and confident about the world she created with it. It felt not just effortless, but somehow limitless. This really galvanised me – as did the video for Royals, which is a great piece of film making.

Helen: I can see that music is a passion for you—and one of the world-building aspects that I love in the story is the way the language of music infuses the language of the people: for example, something is “presto” when done fast in everyday life. Another way in which the recognizable is entwined with the fantastic in your story is through setting, with The Chimes story taking place in a future version of the UK. What drove that choice of setting, rather than a future New Zealand, for example?

Anna: I had been living in London for the past six years, so in many ways the choice was a simple reflection of the fact that I wanted to write about this city that had made such an impression on me. London is intricate, dense, bewildering and wonderful: it gets under your skin. Yet I never felt completely at home there – I loved it, but always felt aware that I was an outsider. So, in many ways my perspective as an expat New Zealander is reflected in Simon’s experience arriving in the city. And culture shock is not without similarity to the disorientation the book describes. London as a city is a wonderful object correlative for the act of memory due to its fragmentary, layered nature: you can be walking along in the present day and stumble across a long-buried piece of the past, and suddenly everything shifts and resettles around you.

Helen: That sense of observer and observed, self and other, comes through strongly in The Chimes. Is it a case of the environment influencing the characters? Or is it more that what is explored between the characters – Simon and Lucien, Lucien and Sonja, and to a lesser degree Simon and Clare – illuminates the world?

Anna: I hope that it’s both. Each of these characters is overwhelmingly shaped by their environment, in particular Simon. He is the victim of forces he can’t control, and they have left him largely reactive, a watcher: he has never had the ability to order his own story. Simon also firmly inhabits and is shaped by the immediate physical world – weather, colour, texture, sound, smell – because this has determined his ability to remember and survive. However, it’s the truths that are generated by these new and unpredictable relationships that reveal the world’s true rules and flaws, and that provide the tools to break down the status quo.

Helen: To close, you appeared at the recent Auckland Writer’s Festival. Were there any standout moments for you?

Anna: What stood out the most was probably the general level of excitement running through the festival as a whole. The queues had this sort of frenetic, charged electricity. I travelled up to Auckland with my three-year-old daughter so didn’t have the chance to attend many of the day-time events, sadly. But it was a thrill to hear Murakami speak, to meet David Mitchell, and to read alongside Bernard Beckett, Emily St. John Mandel, and the Phil(l)ips Temple, and Mann. Luckily, I had been at the Dunedin festival the weekend before, so had already partaken of some true festival brilliance. My standout there was the variously moving and hilarious exchange between Helen Macdonald and Damian Barr, in which they covered everything from lost siblings to childhood pets, as well as, of course, goshawks. 

Helen: Both Dunedin and Auckland sound wonderful experiences—and it’s been lovely having the opportunity to delve more deeply into the process of creating The Chimes today. Thank you, Anna, for sharing your author’s inside take on a fascinating and original speculative world.

—

About the Author:

Photo Credit – Natalie Graham

Anna Smaill was born in Auckland in 1979. She began learning the violin at the age of seven and entered the performance music programme at Canterbury University at 17, though ultimately changed her degree to pursue writing. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Auckland and an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.

Her first book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, was published by Victoria University Press in 2005, and was listed as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the New Zealand Listener.  She and her husband, novelist Carl Shuker, lived in Tokyo for two years before moving to the United Kingdom where she completed a PhD at University College London. From 2009 to 2012, she was a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire.

The Chimes is her debut novel. She is currently at work on her second. She lives on Wellington’s south coast with her husband and daughter.

To find out more about Anna and The Chimes, visit www.annasmaill.com

—

About the Interviewer:

Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night Series, Book Three) is forthcoming in January 2016. Helen blogs regularly and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we.

—

Additional Information:

The Chimes is published internationally by Sceptre (2015; 289 pp), an imprint of Hachette UK. To support this interview, a copy of the book was supplied by Hachette NZ.

Maze

What I miss is gravel
crunching under foot or wheel,
wide sky above
the road straight into horizon.

I want to walk the crease
of a prairie book, lines of wheat
as even type, all one size
the word gold over and over.

London’s a fused maze
of alphabets: wherever you walk,
each road, wherever it turns,
is utterly paved or cobbled crookedly.

A crazed typesetter has been at work
every night for centuries, his head
swirling with shadows thrown
on crumbling walls by candle-flame.

He has set every line diabolical
in a different font and size,
Hot lead in higgledy-piggledy frames
and gutters overflowing with errata.

© Nancy Mattson

from Writing with Mercury (Flambard Press) 2006

—

About the Poem:

Currently, I am refeaturing poems by ex-patriate Canadian poet, Nancy Mattson. Nancy is now resident in London, and I love the way Maze captures the UK/Canadian experience in poetic form, using the extended metaphor of print — not to mention the play-on-words in the title itself, betweem “maize” and “maze.”

Nancy herself said, when the poem first featured here in 2010:

“When I first moved to London twenty years ago I kept getting lost in the winding streets, the layers of history and the echoing voices of writers. What a contrast after the openness of the Canadian prairies, where I was born and raised. I now claim both places as part of my psychogeographic inheritance.”

—

About The Poet:

Nancy Mattson

Nancy Mattson is an ex-patriate Canadian poet, now resident in London. Her third collection of poetry, Finns and Amazons, of which Compasses: A Triptych forms part, was published by Arrowhead Press, in 2012.Nancy began writing poetry in 1977 after completing her MA in English Literature at the University of Alberta. Her poetry, non-fiction and reviews have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and Finland in magazines, anthologies, the odd scholarly journal, a printed encyclopaedia and a couple of parish newsletters.

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.

Anna Smaill’s The Chimes has one of the more fascinating—and I believe, original—world-building premises that I have encountered in recent years. It has also been released to considerable critical praise.

As you may know, I am participating in Rachael King’s #NZBookMonthMay initiative, with my own particular focus being on homegrown speculative fiction.

I can think of no better way to celebrate the month and NZ’s speculative literature than to bring you this interview, which will post on Wednesday.

I do hope you will drop back in to read what Anna has to say. Needless to say, the focus of the interview is fairly and squarely on The Chimes.

I’ve just completed the third (and a bit) weeks of my ‘mission’ to celebrate a NZ Speculative Fiction book every day on Twitter for #NZBookMonthMay — and so far am going strong on not repeating an author.

Here’s the roundup for this week:

Monday 18:

Juliet Marillier, Prickle Moon (Short Fiction Anthology; Fantasy)
.

Tuesday 19:

James Norcliffe, The Loblolly Boy (Junior Fiction; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 20:

Freya Robertson, Heartwood (Epic Fantasy)
.

Thursday 21:

Kelly Ana Moray, Bloom (Magical Realism)
.

Friday 22:

Nalini Singh, Angel’s Blood (Paranormal Urban Romance)
.

Saturday 23:

David Hair, The Bone Tiki (YA; Fantasy)
.

Sunday 24:

Philippa Ballantine, Geist (Fantasy)

I’m on a mission to celebrate a NZ Speculative Fiction book every day on Twitter for #NZBookMonthMay — without repeating an author — but realised that because May started on Friday 1, I had missed out rounding up the first three days here on the blog.

So I am remedying that oversight today.

May 1:

Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck (Fantasy)
.
.

May 2:

Margaret Mahy, The Changeover (YA; Fantasy)
.
.

May 3:

Editors Mark Pirie & Tim Jones, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry From New Zealand (Poetry Anthology; Science Fiction)