In the March edition of Books in Metro magazine (Auckland's local) there is a healthy selection of biography, historical novels and non-fiction. The title that most caught my interest is Nobody's Perfect, a collection of reviews and essays by Anthony Lane from the New Yorker. From the top…

Margo White begins by interviewing Douglas Wright, dancer, choreographer and writer. She describes Ghost Dance (Penguin) as 'beautifully written, traversing the ecstatic highs and miserable lows of an extraordinary life with candour and delicacy, in turns mournful, amusing, sordid, joyful.'

The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl (Random) is set in post-Civil War Boston

…this literary thriller … tells of the small group of eminent literary figures … who, while working together on Longfellow’s first American translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, are horrified to find the Italian poet’s grotesque imaginings of hell being visited on select fellow-Bostonians. Along the way, the book ranges over issues of the period regarding race, religion, immigration, war and academic freedom.

Reviewer Bevan Rapson then goes on to say that 'while the opening is particularly slow, Pearl’s closely-researched description finally breathes life into his project.'

Another '…epic read, one that paints big strokes…' is The Fortune of Solitude by Jonathan Lethum (Faber) which presents 'the lives of two friends growing up on the same street in Brooklyn in the 1970s' writes Jane Wild.

Dylan Ebdus is the white son of a bohemian artist and Mingus Rude is the mulatto son of a has-been musician. … It takes some magic to survive the neighbourhood and its public school battleground, particularly for the lonely white kid, who is either invisible or too visible and friendless except for Mingus.

Letham leads the reader through the boys’ precarious lives inside a fortress of their skin-colour. A terrific evocation of a 1970s childhood, featuring Marvel Comics and Motown.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (Virago), follows the post-war fortunes of handsome and heroic Englishman Aldred Leith, his family, friends and lovers as they readjust to peacetime life in late-1940s Europe and Asia. The book poses the question: 'Where do you find beauty in a scorched and ruined world? The answer seems to be', writes Catherine Hammond, 'in the most unlikely places.'

On the non-fiction angle, Jeffrey Masson’s The Pig Who Sang to the Moon (Jonathan Cape) is a thesis on, as the subtitle explains, The Emotional World of Farm Animals. Some personal anecdotes, some hard-nosed and unappetising facts, reviewer, Frances Walsh, guesses that it may convince one 'if not to become a vegan then to at least pass on a couple of items.'

'An excellent history about the history of malaria' says Simon Farrell-Green of The Miraculous Fever Tree by Fiametta Rocco (HarperCollins).

Rocco’s history is immaculately researched, evocatively written and contains numerous thrills of the chase: the painstaking detail of the scientific research in the 1890s that finally located the role of mosquitoes in the spread of malaria is particularly fascinating. Her frequent diversions, while sometimes bewildering, are ultimately rewarding.

Nobody’s Perfect is a collection of profiles, movie and book reviews by Anthony Lane to honour the anniversary of the New Yorker. Margo White admits that 'Lane is funny on just about everything.'

The role of the critic is not to tell people what they should see, writes Anthony Lane, the film critic for the New Yorker for the past 10 years, but to 'file a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading or plunging…'

White especially encourages the reader to turn to the reviews of 'Singalong-a-Sound-of-Music', a piece about the people who dress up in costume to sing along with the film. It seems that most of these 'movie-goers' dress as nuns though 'Ray, a Drop of Golden Sun' has also made his appearance there!

Metro has no on-line counterpart but is available in read-in-the-bath format from your local newsagent or similar.