The 20 best New Zealand books of the 21st century

The Conversation’s Books & Ideas team decided to create an Australian and New Zealand list of the best 21st-century books. Photo / 123rf
The Conversation has asked more than 20 New Zealand literary experts, including Catherine Chidgey, Tina Makereti and Whiti Hereaka, to share their favourite NZ books published since 2000. What did they choose?
Last month, we enjoyed reading The New York Times Best Books of the 21st century – but were disappointed it included no Australian or New Zealand authors.
From New Zealand, even Booker winner Eleanor Catton and Women’s Prize longlisted Catherine Chidgey, writers whose books have made a significant impact in the US and UK, didn’t get a mention.
So, The Conversation’s Books & Ideas team decided to create our own Australian and New Zealand lists.
For Aotearoa New Zealand, we worked with The Conversation’s NZ editor Finlay Macdonald, a former book publisher and Listener editor. Together, we asked more than 20 local literary experts to each share their favourite NZ book of the century.
The result was a list of 20 top books, including titles by Catton and Chidgey, together with a rich treasure trove of honourable mentions (we allowed up to two each).
The three books that tied as the most picked were Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore (2008), Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival (2022) and Tina Makereti’s The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke (2018).
And what were our own picks?
Finlay’s top spot goes to Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame (2000), for turning rugby into art, with his honourable mention going to Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand (2003), for making local history a massive bestseller.
Books & Ideas editor Suzy Freeman-Greene and deputy editor Jo Case both chose Chidgey’s 1980s-set psychological thriller Pet (2002) as their very favourite, for its biting social observations and escalating menace.
Jo’s honourable mentions are Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008) and Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife (2008), while Suzy’s are Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) and Perkins’ Lioness (2023).
From the first sentence, I fell under the spell of Tina Makereti’s gorgeously written, finely researched The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke (Vintage New Zealand, 2018). Narrated by a young Māori boy exhibited as a curiosity, it brings Victorian London to filthy, teeming life. The watched watches back in this clever read.
Recommended by Catherine Chidgey, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, University of Waikato
“Let me take you into the dream,” invites Hēmi Pōneke, Tina Makereti’s imagined version of a historical Māori figure. This bildungsroman dreams life and love into Hemi Pōmare, who worked as a “professional spectacle” in Victorian London.
Recommended by Thom Conroy, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
This suspenseful, feminist, bird-centric novel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022) delivers a powerful indictment against anthropocentrism, masculinist rural culture and domestic violence. Narrator Tama, a charming magpie who bonds with the woman farmer who raises him, refreshingly explores human relationships through avian eyes. Even better, Chidgey imagines magpies’ own worldviews.
Recommended by Annie Potts, Professor, Human-Animal Studies, English Department, University of Canterbury
The language of Catherine Chidgey’s magpie narrator swoops and sings as his beady eye lights on human foibles, rural hardship, influencers, followers, and the sadness of a childless woman. It’s a book of astonishing imaginative power and of empathy, insight and humour. Honourable mention: Catherine Chidgey’s Pet (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), the creepiest NZ read since Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Who can you trust?
Recommended by Sarah Shieff, Associate Professor, English and Writing Studies, University of Waikato
The Rocky Shore (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2008) is a sequence of six long poems, which meditate on the scope and nature of personal poetry and the poetic voice. Lyrical, intimate, allusive and conversational, they fashion a kind of communicated introspection, grounded in (but not limited by) the everyday world of house, garden, family and neighbourhood. Inevitable honourable mention: Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2013): monumental, entrancing, cryptic, unaccommodating.
Recommended by Jane Stafford, Adjunct Professor, English, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
This devastating and mysteriously companionable book of poems reads like fiction in its grasp of character and its ranging scenes. Six longish poems written over six years, pulled from the true life settings of the poet’s encounters with chronic pain, grief (“I miss my father / I miss having a father”), and other kinds of anguish. Magically, the book is not a downer. I read it again just now and it was as fresh and open as ever. Honourable mentions: Lifted by Bill Manhire (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2005), The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2008), Nothing to See by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020).
Recommended by Damien Wilkins, Director, International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
The Luminaries (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2013) was a comet, illuminating all the sky, but who knows where my lent copy’s gone, from what outer reaches its distant light flickers. I recall an “eye of god” novel – full of costume and coincidence, with all the base elements: opium, murder, gold. It was an origin story and a dispossession story. But imagine omniscience when it’s only the stars seeing, when some zodiacal law halves the chapters, halves them again, so the last is only a blink – and it feels like a solar flare.
Recommended by Alex Calder, Professor, English and Drama, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
My pick is Towards Another Summer (Vintage) Janet Frame’s posthumous novel, written in 1963, and published in 2007. Any new Janet Frame book would be important; Towards Another Summer, which Frame dismissed and refused to publish because it was “too personal” is a crucial piece of her arc as a writer. The novel traces the familiar antipodean emigrant path between the Pacific and London, filtered through Frame’s singular vision and her burning, defamiliarising language. A great place to start for new readers of Frame.
Recommended by Kate Duignan, Lecturer in Creative Writing, International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Immensely bold, controlled and absolutely visceral, Unsheltered’s (Scribner, 2022) dystopian view of a world and country in which you are either sheltered or thrown back on your own desperate devices is really about the primal force and sacrifice of motherhood, within an otherwise transactional struggle for survival. Its descriptive and emotional power creates images and scenes that brand themselves on the frontal cortex and defy any reader to remain detached.
Recommended by Ken Duncum, Associate Professor, International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
One of those books that you want to pull apart to work out how the writer did it. How did she weave the themes together so subtly? And get that musical rise and fall? How did she pack so much into so few words? Drill so deeply into emotions while avoiding any hint of sentimentality? In Big Music (Faber, 2012), Kirsty Gunn conveys all the messiness of family emotions with the spareness of an elegant piece of music. I am in awe of it.
Recommended by Gigi Fenster, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s Ruahine, Mythic Women (Huia, 2003) is a collection of short stories that retells and reimagines the stories of the women from pūrākau, or legends. My favourite stories are Rona and (unsurprisingly!) Kurungaituku, the bird woman. These stories have been influential in my work, and the cover art by Lisa Reihana was inspired by the story Kurungaituku. This collection made me reconsider the “myths” I had grown up reading and ask who was telling those stories and why. Honourable mentions: Wake by Elizabeth Knox (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2013), for its visceral horror and considered portrayal of a community coming together after a mysterious tragedy, and Nothing to See by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020), with its clones, trauma and society’s unwillingness to see both.
Recommended by Whiti Hereaka, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
Pete and Mary are in their 80s. They are doing the sensible thing, and giving up a house they love. While wrestling with changes, they are contacted by someone who did them great harm in the past and wants to meet them before he dies, a request which sends them back to memories shared, and not shared – because they’ve always protected each other. Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024) made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.
Recommended by Elizabeth Knox, Workshop convenor, International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku (Huia, 2021) is a brilliant rewriting of Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman. A deeply lyrical work, Kurangaituku is also a fascinating exploration of form, as its pages are bound within inverted front covers that approach the narrator Kurangaituku’s story from different planes of existence. Its retellings move with Kurangaituku between the human and the avian, between the places of life and death and becoming. It embeds the reader in the transformative power of words and holds you close long after the covers are closed.
Recommended by Dr Maebh Long, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of Waikato
A mythical, futurist fable, Little Doomsdays (Massey University Press, 2023) by Nic Low (Ngai Tahu) and Phil Dadson is just a profound and astonishing book and does everything I would want to see a 21st-century book do. It looks into the future while collecting the evidence of our pasts; it is moving, funny and shocking. It is an entirely new thing in form: an indigenous story that goes beyond genre and beyond international borders, out into the universe and back, the text and images inseparable.
Recommended by Tina Makereti, Senior Lecturer, International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
How Did I Get Here? Soliloquies of Youth, edited by Ben Brown (The Cuba Press, 2020), gripped me with the raw power of its poems by young men from the Te Puna Wai o Tūhinapō, the Oranga Tamariki youth justice residence. These young voices, often silenced, speak volumes through spare lines and unvarnished truths. Their poems haunt, revealing beauty in simplicity. I couldn’t stop reading or feeling. It became my most gifted book, moving everyone who opened its pages. This work has mana – a taonga that changes you, making you listen harder to voices we often miss. Ben has created something rare and profound, reminding us why we write poetry: to hear ourselves, and then be heard.
Recommended by Selina Tusitala Marsh, Professor, English, Drama, Writing Studies, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
CURNOW: the yellow lettering against a blue slipcase reminds me, looking up at the shelf, of so many of the elements that make our literature sing. Inside is Allen Curnow: Collected Poems, edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Strum (Auckland University Press, 2017) and Allen Curnow: Simply By Sailing in a New Direction by Terry Strum, edited by Linda Cassells (Auckland University Press, 2017). The collected poems are Allen Curnow’s, surely the most important we have so far in shaping a Pākehā tradition. His biography, nestled alongside these poems in the slipcase, conjures a whole lost world. The poems amaze and confuse me: Sturm’s scholarship astounds. Both will last.
Recommended by Dougal McNeill, Lecturer in English, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
“Best”? My favourite so far is definitely Whiti Hereaka’s YA novel Bugs (Huia Publishers, 2013). The teenage narrator Bugs is a brilliant creation: smart, naive, funny, affectionate. She and Jez have been mates forever until rich Pākehā new girl Stone Cold shows up. Following Bugs trying to navigate her way through the ethical, racial, and social reefs that confront her – an archipelago of friendship, family, adolescence, small-town Aotearoa – had me, fourth time around, just as lump-in-throat. Great ending. Honourable mentions: Hamish Clayton’s genre-bending Wulf (Penguin, 2011) and Emily Perkins’ humanist page-turner Lioness (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Recommended by Harry Ricketts, Professor Emeritus, School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
I am choosing new, fresh, quirky, and extraordinarily heartwarming. I love the Auckland (and the Wellington) of Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta and Valdin (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021): it is Indigenous and global, humane and hilarious, a multicultural extended family. The sibling protagonists leap from the page – as do their queer partners and their pitch-perfect Moldovan relatives. Greta and Valdin has its flaws, but its mercurial sense of identity encapsulates a joyous new 21st-century freedom from the idea of the “great New Zealand novel”. Highly honourable, hefty mentions: Allen Curnow: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction and Allen Curnow: Collected Poems – essential, magisterial. And Michael King’s Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Counterpoint, 2000) – an extraordinary biography and one of the last publications of a New Zealand great.
Recommended by Sarah C. E. Ross, Professor in English Literature, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
From the Antipodes (Maungatua Press 2002, revised 2003, 2017) is a book-length poem. Its hundred pages recalibrate allusive literariness to include Aotearoa. A visit from Dante is one part of making a new literary whakapapa of elsewheres and heres. This poetry’s historical looping rewrites future as past and past as future – from flora and fauna to multilingualism, from “coo roo coo” to te kore. Gorgeous rhythmic energy and visionary drive. Also: Cilla McQueen’s Axis (Otago, 2001) and Craig Foltz’s Locals Only: An Outsider’s Insider Perspective on Aotearoa (Compound, 2020).
Recommended by Lisa Samuels, Professor of English and Drama, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Poūkahangatus (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2018), the debut collection by one of New Zealand’s most prominent and internationally successful poets, is a joy to read. Exuberant, laconic, anti-colonial, neocolonial, a whakapapa (or ancestry) of women poets encouraging a contemporary Māori female-centred poetics. This collection represents an entire movement of poets who are still emerging here. Anyone who reads New Zealand poetry must know about Tayi Tibble’s poetry.
Recommended by Robert Sullivan, Associate Professor, Creative Writing, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
Patricia Grace’s gripping, poignant novel Tu (Penguin, 2004) is my pick. Brothers Pita, Rangi and Te Hokowhitu-a-Tu fight together in the Māori Battalion in the Allied campaign in southern Italy. 1940s Wellington, with its Ngati Poneke Club and Centennial Exhibition, forms a vibrant counterpoint to the winter-time assault on “Jerry” from which, among the brothers, only Tu returns. At the heart of a story that slowly reveals family secrets is the grim battle for Cassino, with its “ol’ man” mountain. Honourable mention: Bill Manhire’s poetry collection Lifted (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2005) compels repeated readings, especially the haunting threnody, Erebus Voices.
Recommended by Sophie Tomlinson, Senior Lecturer in English and Drama, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
In Playing God (Steele Roberts, 2002) – the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Award poetry winner – Glenn Colquhoun draws from his experience as a doctor in poems that are surprising and inventive in approach and form (poem as a curse, spell, visual acuity test). Witty and touching, with titles like Taking Confessions and Performing Miracles, the collection is grounded in empathy and an awareness of medicine’s limitations. But its true subject is what it is to be human – doctor and patient alike – in all our wonder and frailty.
Recommended by Bryan Walpert, Professor and Creative Writing Coordinator, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
In Gifted (Victoria University Press, 2010), Patrick Evans inhabits the mind of Frank Sargeson as he recounts his time with a young Janet Frame. The novel contains worlds within worlds, elements of philosophical enquiry, and scenes of remarkable tenderness. It’s poised, like a holy riddle one can’t quite summon to speech, at a point of generation: to new ways of thinking about novels, and to new ways of reading and writing culture made possible by Frame. And nobody writes sentences like Evans. Honourable Mentions: Carl Shuker, The Method Actors (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005); Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2020).
Recommended by Nicholas Wright, Lecturer, English, University of Canterbury