Even in God’s Own Country, the devil finds work. The most important review in this week’s Listener is David Hill’s appraisal of the lost classic We Will Not Cease by Archibald Baxter, newly reprinted by Cape Catley.

In case anyone isn't aware, or needs reminding what some New Zealanders did to others, Archibald Baxter was a poetry-reciting farm worker in Otago who by 1914 opposed military service on pacifist and religious grounds. He was arrested, his appeal was rejected because he wasn't a communicating member of a church, he was subjected to eroding little humiliations in Dunedin and Trentham, and when he still refused to accept military orders, he was shipped to France and the Western Front.

Hideous things were done to him there. Best-known and worst-conceived was the spell of No 1 Field Punishment, where he was strapped to a post for four hours a day, placed so that his weight dragged at his shoulders and back. Bound there one morning, he almost died in a snowstorm. It has become an iconic moment.

The horror didn’t stop there. Baxter was starved and beaten, exposed to falling shells, and on his return to our green and pleasant land, was persecuted until the 1960s.

All else pales beside this terrible book, but the other releases covered this week include The Memoirs Of Millicent Baxter, the autobiography of Archie Baxter’s wife. Says reviewer Hill

She can write prose as scoured as driftwood. "Well, the important things are obvious and simple," she raps. Her simple, important things build into a packed story. "In this book, I should like to show that it is possible to have an ideal marriage." So polite. So grammatical. So absolute.

Another reprint is Scott's Last Expedition: The journals of Captain R F Scott. According to Julia Millen:

Scott's journals (originally published in 1913) are here reprinted from the 1923 edition, beginning with the departure from New Zealand in a leaky boat, Terra Nova, in November 1910. As well as recording daily activities throughout the following months until the fatal end, the book includes quotes from Scott's letters home, footnotes and appendices with names of dogs, ponies and their sponsors and an index. Lamentably missing from this edition are analysis and objective comment – not even a foreword.

Ninety years after Scott's party died (in March 1912), his journals record a rather chaotic schoolboy adventure that went horribly wrong, but also show that Scott's allure comes from his way with words and stiff-upper-lip courage.

Also noted, by Fiona Rae: Eleanor & Abel by Annette Sanford (“contains septuagenarian love scenes”), Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker (“what should be an evocative and atmospheric tale lies dead on the page”) and Three Junes by Julia Glass (“deft and astute”).

Rumpole and the Primrose Path is the latest in the long-running series by John Mortimer. (Says Jane Clifton: “… as an exercise in poking fun and defending both the basic concept of fairness and the English language, it's hard to find a more successful and sustained example than Rumpole.”)

According to Hedley Mortlock, Ruth Rendell’s The Rottweiler is “cosy, relaxing, satisfying and undemanding … not so much a whodunit as a whydunit.” Patricia Cornwell’s Blow Fly has been resident in the New Zealand International Fiction for Adults bestseller list for around six months now, but “Cornwall's recent books seem vaguely silly. Her characters have become irritating. Perhaps it is time for Scarpetta to go.”

The Lunar Men: The friends who made the future by Jenny Uglow is a biography of a dozen men and their families in Britain in the second half of the 18th century, on the eve of Industrial Revolution. Barry Reay finds it to be “an endlessly fascinating story. Sprawling, told with guile and purpose, The Lunar Men is a carefully constructed and brilliantly ordered piece of historical writing.”