Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is one of those slow building books that is set to become huge. First published in the US in 2000, it was released in paperback a year ago and immediately scored a full-page report in the New York Times Book Review, a rare achievement for a reprint. Sherrill has since finished his second novel, Visits From a Drowned Girl, and is now working on his third.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break has finally arrived in New Zealand, and like so many before him, the Herald’s David Larsen is entranced. It’s a magic realist story: the Minotaur has escaped the labyrinth, and now works as a line cook at Grub's Rib in North Carolina. Despite his poor eyesight and horns, he has only occasional accidents.

… Sherrill writes like a god. Every page of this book is alive with the kind of easy clarity most writers can't achieve at their rare, inspired best … This is a sad book, and though it's also a funny one, the humour is intensely cringe-inducing. You won't put it down with a merry smile on your lips. It's a richly intelligent meditation on loneliness and alienation. It's one of my books of the year.

Our Lady of the Forest is by David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars. This one’s about the need for spiritual belief and salvation, and features a 16-year-old runaway rape victim. According to Margie Thomson,

Guterson writes beautifully, with quiet power, his pages peopled with wittily evoked characters who together comprise a Breughel-like illustration of life in all its shabby torment. Unemployment, hopelessness, illness, pain, divorce, lovelessness, empty sex, the hatred of people unlike ourselves, perpetual rain ... boy, do these people ever need hope and salvation.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace seems less successful, as Philippa Jamieson explains:

This is a book to read in large chunks - a few pages before bed makes it hard to get into. Don't expect a plot. Don't expect a novel, or autobiography, or memoir - it's the Chinese form of "talk-story", a collage of mythical, real and imaginary worlds. … The sentiments are laudable, but this rambling, 400-page treatise loses momentum, and lost my interest. A more severe edit would have eliminated repetition and the dross of detail.