Last week’s Listener featured an excellent article on the 50 Best New Zealand Books, as chosen by a panel of eminent local literary types. Unfortunately, it was offline and only available to readers of the print edition.

This week, the Listener is the latest publication to focus on Douglas Wright’s Ghost Dance. According to reviewer David Eggleton,

Ghost Dance is a book redolent of death and mortality, of eulogies and valedictions. Yet, as much as it's a lyrical elegy for vanished friends and vanished performances, it's also a sharply told black comedy, recording an unusual New Zealander's struggle against adversity and low expectations.

The other two New Zealand books covered this week are both novels for younger readers, and reviewed by Barbara Murison: Lin and the Red Stranger by Ken Catran, and Home Boys by Bernard Beckett.

Catran’s novel Voyage with Jason won the NZ Post Children's Book Awards of 2001, and Lin and the Red Stranger is a finalist in the Young Adult Fiction section this year. Murison owns and publishes the Marigold guides to quality reading for children and teenagers, and reckons that Lin is

... easy enough reading, which could be appreciated by upper primary age readers as well as the 12 plus at whom I guess it is aimed.

Beckett has won local fame as the author of Jolt and No Alarms. Home Boys, about a child migrant just after WWII, is stronger material than Catran’s book:

Beckett, with his long experience as a secondary-school teacher, excels at getting inside the heads of his characters. There is much really strong writing in Home Boys … but librarians and teachers buying Home Boys need to be aware of the detailed sexual references.