This week’s Listener is the last one under the control of Finlay Macdonald. In his final editorial, he says, "I've sometimes joked that planning and putting out a magazine like this is a bit like being run over by the same truck every Wednesday."

They’ve managed to get the Janet Frame story on the cover, so it must have been a pretty big truck last week. (Unfortunately, the C K Stead appreciation of Frame inside the magazine is offline.)

On the Books front, Denis Welch has written an interesting piece on Ian Cross, author of The God Boy. And Roy Colbert enjoys Voyaging The Pacific by Miles Hordern, an Englishman living on Waiheke Island:

a beautifully written account of sailing solo in a 28-foot sloop across the Southern Ocean, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth.

Christine Cole Catley surveys a brace of enjoyable literary thrillers. Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas is

about as good as they get … a story that is very much of the present while rooted most satisfyingly and believably in the past.

The Silence of the Rain is by Brazilian Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza:

Someone has said that if Gabriel Garcia Marquez were to write crime fiction, he, too, might have created a detective like Espinosa. Praise indeed. The Silence of the Rain has won Brazil's two major literary prizes.

Following the Wake is by Gemma O'Connor:

The plot is convoluted, the emotions raw and believable. The anguish and cruel speculations that an unscrupulous journalist in search of a story can bring about are what stay in memory from this book. Perhaps it's enough to say that the word "wake" has more than one meaning.

The Murdered House by Pierre Magnan is "perhaps as much about places as about people … a creepy tale of a French family murdered in a remote village in Provence."