Tag: novel

Coming Attractions – Part 2

Posted on

After a couple of excellent events last week, there are more to come this week!

Wednesday 14 October, 12.30pm: Cityscapes, Snowscapes, Seascapes

Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis St

After Michelle Elvy’s excellent book launch at Aurelia Books on Sunday, here is your chance to hear a panel with Michelle and two other authors with new books coming out soon.

A lunchtime reading and discussion by three authors with new books: Leanne Comer, David Coyle and Michelle Elvy.

Poster for "Cityscapes, Snowscapes, Seascapes", a lunchtime reading and discussion by three authors with new books: Leanne Comer, David Coyle and Michelle Elvy. Poster shows the covers of these books, and other details in the text of this post in black text against a white background.

Thursday 15 October, 6-7.30pm: Launch of And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane

Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis St

Event begins 6pm, speeches planned for 6.30pm

I’m really looking forward to the launch of Mia Farlane’s new novel. From the cover being created in the window of Unity Books to some great panels and events, Mia and Mākaro Press have done a great job of the publicity – now the book itself is revealed to the world!

Inivitation to the launch of Mia Farlane's new novel, with details in the text of this post. Image has white text on a blue background to the left, and on the right, an image of the book cover.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1016370291460755

More about this book and Mia’s writing: https://miafarlane.com/

Sunday 18 October, 4-6pm, Poetry and Music at Newtown’s Office Bar – Pōtihia / Vote

Office Bar, 124 Riddford St, Newtown

Free entry.

“With this country’s General Election coming up in November, we have decided to make the whole programme Open Mike and encourage people to share work with a political theme if they would like to – with the definition of ‘political’ being as broad and accommodating as it needs to be….. This can be spoken word or song and your own work or the work of others. And for the musicians out there, some instrumental interludes would also be welcome!

About the venue:We use their upstairs space and there is no lift, so if you might need some assistance with the stairs, please let us know. Also, they don’t serve tea or coffee, but you are welcome to bring a flask from home or pick up a take-away to bring in.”

Tim adds: Remember – if you want to vote to get rid of this Government, you must enrol by 25 October!

Poster for Poetry and Music at Newtown's Office Bar, with details also included in the text of this post. Poster is in black and white with a green border, showing stylised images of prominent NZ politicians holding signs in Te Reo.

Book review: Ruby and the Land of Birds, by Latika Vasil

Posted on

Ruby and the Land of Birds, by Latika Vasil (Wellington: Korobee Press, 2026). ISBN 978-0-473-79333-3.
RRP NZ$30.00. Available from https://latikavasil.com/shop/ (includes shipping anywhere in New Zealand) and in Wellington, from independent bookshops including Unity, The Children’s Bookshop, Marsden Books and Aurelia Books (soon).

Front cover of Ruby and the Land of Birds, by Latika Vasil. Image shows a schoolgirl with backpack pointing at a kākā in a tree against a background of dense New Zealand bush.

There’s a great deal to like about Latika Vasil’s new middle grade novel Ruby and the Land of Birds, and it starts with the evocative cover: the kākā, the schoolgirl with her bag, and the pre-human forest. On a school trip to Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush, Ruby – struggling to find her feet at her new school – and her classmate Jasper fall through time to the same place a thousand or more years ago, when the forest primeval is populated by birds and other entities that have very varied views about the young interlopers who have just dropped in on them.

Ruby and Jasper are well-written, believable kids – ingenious but impetuous, prone to sudden rows but open to reconciliation, each outsiders in their school, easy to empathise with and like – and I had no trouble getting engaged in their story and wanting them to overcome the obstacles this world places in their path. They encounter a wise mentor who helps their journey, but who can’t shield them from all the dangers they face. In the end, it is their own actions that must save them. 

This is a survival story, but the level of peril is appropriate for the book’s intended audience, while still keeping me as an adult reader eagerly turning the pages. I was cheering for the two children to make it home safe, and while I won’t spoil the ending, I thought it hit just the right note.

If you’re looking for a story that will entertain children of ages 8-12+, especially those who love nature, I can definitely recommend Ruby and the Land of Birds.

My new poetry collection “Dracula in the Colonies” is launching in Wellington on Wednesday 1 October!

Posted on

My new poetry collection Dracula in the Colonies is launching at Unity Books Wellington on Wednesday 1 October from 6-7.30pm. It’s a double book launch: my  Dracula in the Colonies and Mandy Hager’s new novel Revenge and Rabbit Holes.

Image version of the launch details included in this post, showing the covers of Dracula in the Colonies and Revenge and Rabbit Holes

All are welcome – no need to RSVP. And if you invite your friend, friends, partner, partners, or large and lavishly remunerated workplace* along, even better!

*Possibly fictional.

Dracula in the Colonies has received a couple of very nice endorsements from poets whose work I admire:

Janis Freegard: “Tim Jones’ powerful new collection takes us from Grimsby to Antarctica, traversing family life, migration, politics, climate change and loss. This is honest, tender, funny and intelligent writing from a story-teller poet.”

Erik Kennedy: “Eminently readable but never comfortable … Dracula in the Colonies is full of characters you’ll love to hate from a poet whose work we know to love.”

Thank you, Erik and Janis!

All the details

The launch will be at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington, from 6-7.30pm on Wednesday 1 October 2025. There will be drinks, nibbles, and books for sale and signing.

The Facebook event is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1159319136008748/

My thanks to everyone who has already said they plan to attend, and those who’ve let me know they can’t make it.

I can’t make it, but I’d love a copy of the book:

The Cuba Press has you covered! You can pre-order Dracula in the Colonies here: https://thecubapress.nz/shop/dracula-in-the-colonies/

You’re invited to a double book launch on Wednesday 1 October: Dracula in the Colonies by Tim Jones and Revenge and Rabbit Holes by Mandy Hager

Posted on

image.png

You and your friends are warmly invited to a double book launch at Unity Books on Wednesday 1 October: my new poetry collection Dracula in the Colonies and Mandy Hager’s new novel Revenge and Rabbit Holes.

All are welcome – no need to RSVP!

The launch will be at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington, from 6-7.30pm on Wednesday 1 October 2025. There will be drinks, nibbles, and books for sale and signing.

The Facebook event is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1159319136008748/

My thanks to everyone who has already said they plan to attend, and those who’ve let me know they can’t make it.

If you can’t make it, please pre-order Dracula in the Colonies here: https://thecubapress.nz/shop/dracula-in-the-colonies/

Book review: Strays & Waifs: A Chasing Ghosts Mystery, by Mandy Hager

Posted on

Strays & Waifs: A Chasing Ghosts Mystery, by Mandy Hager (The Cuba Press, 2024), 286 pp. See https://mandyhager.com/chasing-ghosts/ and https://thecubapress.nz/shop/strays-and-waifs/

Reviewed by Tim Jones

I heard Mandy Hager read the first chapter of Strays & Waifs on a climate fiction and poetry panel at Newtown Library. It was a gripping description of a house destroyed by flood as the person living there, the novel’s protagonist Bella, can only watch in horror.

We learn that Bella is a climate fiction author and former climate activist, and both these aspects play into the narrative, but this is a murder mystery with a supernatural component. The novel does not follow the path I was expecting, but once I had recalibrated my expectations I got fully on board with the new direction.

I called Bella the protagonist above, because we meet her first and gradually learn about her past as a climate activist and how what happened then has led to deep trauma that still affects her in the present. That, and an unwelcome reminder of her past who turns up in the present, is one of the ghosts present in the story, but far from the only one.

That brings us to Freyja, the other protagonist – I think she is central enough to this story that she crosses the porous line between important secondary character and protagonist. Freyja has some unusual abilities which Bella initially recoils from – as did I as a reader at first; but Mandy Hager shows with great skill how Bella comes to tolerate and then accept those abilities, which come in mighty handy as the pair become involved in bringing justice to the dead and rescue to the living.

I know people very like Bella, so I had no difficulty believing in her as a character; I don’t know many people like Freyja, but she is so well-drawn that I soon found myself believing in her as well.

Mandy Hager writes with tremendous immediacy. And this is no drawing-room mystery: there is action too, vividly described action in which the skills Bella learned as a committed direct activist come into play. As a reader, I felt myself slipping in mud, I felt branches slap my face as I ran through the bush with a bad actor in hot pursuit.

The identity and nature of the villain is all too plausible – all too depressingly plausible – but they’re not exactly subtle, and I would have welcomed a bit more misdirection in that regard. Though, looking at the world around us, villains now delight in boasting of their villainy – so maybe I’m the one clinging to outdated expectations?

There are some really satisying punch-the-air moments in this book, and if the biggest one for me is when Bella turns to the New Zealand Companies Register database to find vital information, equally satisfying moments are also there for people who are less interested in deep-dive research into corporate villains than I am!

Strays & Waifs does justice to its premise, to its main and secondary characters, and to the reader, and starts to pull on the dangling threads of Bella’s past in ways that make me excited for the possibility of further “Chasing Ghosts” mysteries. Very little stays hidden forever.

A Great Review for Emergency Weather + Two Books I Really Enjoyed Reading

Posted on

A good review is always nice to get, and especially when it’s unexpected. That’s why I was so pleased to see this review of Emergency Weather by Alyson Baker, and especially to see the praise she had for the plotting:

The plotting of Emergency Weather is brilliant. Allie’s harrowing attempt to reach Dunedin Airport, and Stephanie and Miranda’s nightmare tramping trip prepare the reader for what lies ahead. The three main characters weave around each other in passing before eventually ending up in the same place – a memorial service held after a climate catastrophe. The death toll is 43: “a good number for action: large enough to be shocking, small enough that the people killed could be distinguished in the public mind, could be seen as individuals rather than statistics.”

That is what Emergency Weather is about: how can people be motivated to act?

Want to buy a copy of Emergency Weather? Try your local independent bookstore or order direct from The Cuba Press!

PS: If your local library doesn’t stock it, please recommend it to them!



Two Books I Really Enjoyed

Light Keeping by Adrienne Jansen

Light Keeping is an understated novel of quiet power. Set against the ruthless cost-cutting that led to the replacement of lighthouse keepers with automation, it follows a family of lighthouse keepers as they navigate both personal tragedy and institutional indifference, with the latest generation trying to escape the long shadow of the past.

Adrienne Jansen does a great job of intertwining the personal upheavals of her protagonists’ lives with the vagaries of coastline, sea and weather. The boundary between land and sea on which the lonely lighthouse stands is blurred by both disaster and hope, as Jess and Robert struggle to keep the light in view.

Remains To Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by Lee Murray

Remains To be Told is a very strong anthology of dark fantasy stories and poems from Aotearoa – and I’m not just saying that because one of my poems is including in this anthology! Editor Lee Murray has pulled together a group of authors known for their horror and dark fantasy work, including Neil Gaiman, and others better known for work outside the field, most notably Owen Marshall.

Many of the stories focus to be found in rural Aotearoa – this anthology shows that “New Zealand Gothic” is alive and well, yet it also has a strong and welcome focus on indigenous stories and indigenous mythology. If you want to experience what lies under the surface of the tourist promotional photos and Instagram influencers’ images of unspoiled nature and carefully curated tourism images, this is the anthology for you.

Emergency Weather: A Storm Warning

Posted on

Tuesday 12 December 2023 dawned a fine summer’s day in Wellington. But in mid-afternoon, the weather changed. A southerly front raced up the country, bringing very strong winds, heavy rain and hail to Wellington and the Hutt. 

I was sitting at my desk, and I felt and saw the change: the temperature dropped abruptly, and sunshine was abruptly replaced by cascading rain. It was all over within 90 minutes, and despite over 20 mm of rain falling at our place within a few minutes, we got off fairly lightly.

But friends I’ve talked to since weren’t so lucky. One was inside a mall that rapidly flooded; another had part of their roof torn off their house – one of a number of buildings in the Hutt that suffered serious damage.

Author Andy Southall captures it well in his Goodreads review of my novel Emergency Weather:

“A day after finishing this book, a sudden and savage storm struck Wellington. At 2.50pm the sun was shining on what seemed to be a pleasant summer day. Ten minutes later the sky turned black, violent winds blew out windows, hail was smashing into the deck and sheets of water poured from the gutters. And that was in a less extreme part of the storm’s path. Elsewhere it was much, much worse.”

and this Radio New Zealand report gives the bigger picture.

My novel Emergency Weather begins and ends with storms – the first causes death and damage from north to south, while the second and stronger storm zeroes in on Wellington. Wellington has always been prone to storms, but climate change is loading the dice, making it more likely that when storms come, they will be damaging and destructive.

Emergency Weather cover at Petone beach

My novel is set against the context of a government in which (some) Ministers are at least trying to do the right thing. But the recent election, which Labour lost by a combination of its own timidity and many voters’ desire for something different, has brought to power a government including climate deniers, environmental vandals, and worshippers at the altar of the car. If climate change is on their agenda at all, it’s well below culture wars.

But physical reality doesn’t care about ideology. So long as we keep loading the climate dice by burning fossil fuels and forcing cows to produce milk, piss nitrates and burp methane, the storms and the fires and the flooding will get worse. If we stop, the climate will have a chance to recover. No amount of denialism changes that.

(Excuse me, Tim! It’s just before Christmas and you’re supposed to be encouraging people to buy your book!)

Err … buy my book if you’re looking for a good summer read – it’s not all, or even mostly, doom and gloom! – and have a great holiday! Here’s to lots of good reading, and good organising for change, in 2024.

Emergency Weather: Successfully Launched, Well Reviewed, and More to Come!

Posted on

Successfully Launched

Mandy Hager launches Emergency Weather
Mandy Hager launches Emergency Weather. Photo: Stephen Olsen

I was nervous heading into the launch of Emergency Weather. Unity is a great place for a launch, but it looks very empty if no-one comes – and there were other launches, as well as election meetings, on in downtown Wellington at the same time.

I needn’t have worried! Around 100 lovely people came to the launch, we sold plenty of books and I had a great time. It was good to see old friends, new friends, and people I’d never seen before!

Kate from Unity Books introduced the launch, then we heard from Paul from The Cuba Press and Cadence from the Whitireia Publishing programme before the book was launched by author Mandy Hager, whose speech really moved me. Then it was time for me to speak, read the very beginning of the novel, and sign lots of copies! If you missed the launch, the YouTube video is available or you can read Stephen Olsen’s report: https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=155655 (he also took the photo above).

If you didn’t make the launch but would like to get on trend and buy a copy of Emergency Weather, it’s available:

* At Unity Books and Good Books in Wellington, and other independent bookshops nationwide, including UBS in Dunedin – if it’s not available from your nearest independent bookshop or Paper Plus, please ask them to order it in.

* Directly from The Cuba Press: https://thecubapress.nz/shop/emergency-weather/

* From Wheelers: https://www.wheelers.co.nz/books/9781988595726-emergency-weather/

* Through the new NZ BookHub site, launched three days after my book!

Tim Jones signs a copy of Emergency Weather
Tim Jones signs a copy of Emergency Weather (photo: Kate, Unity Books)

Well Reviewed

It’s also been good – and again, a testament to the hard work of The Cuba Press and Whitireia Publishing – to see reviews of Emergency Weather appearing. Online reviews:

Radio New Zealand: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018910488/book-critic-catherine-roberston

Kete: https://www.ketebooks.co.nz/all-book-reviews/emergency-weather-jones

Aotearoa Review of Books: https://www.nzreviewofbooks.com/emergency-weather-by-tim-jones/

You can help a lot by adding the book to your Goodreads library and rating or reviewing it: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198972056-emergency-weather

More to Come

It’s not quite the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, but here are some upcoming Wellington events I’m involved in that you’re warmly invited to attend:

Unity Books Panel, Wednesday 18 October, 12.30-1.30pm: “Talking Up a Storm: The Making of Emergency Weather”: https://www.facebook.com/events/288705720676072/ (Facebook event link). Find out how a novel is written, edited, published and marketed.

Verb Wellington event, 11 November, 3-5pm – this one is for Remains to be Told, but I might weave in a mention or two of Emergency Weather as well.

Invitation to the launch of my new novel Emergency Weather

Posted on

You are officially invited to the launch of my new climate fiction novel Emergency Weather – and here’s a look at the cover!

Emergency Weather launch invitation and cover image

The launch will take place on Wednesday 4 October at Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis St, from 6pm – please encourage your friends to come along too!

Here is the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/667791528368999

Please sign up for this if you use Facebook, as it helps us know numbers attending.

Emergency Weather will be available from all good bookshops from 2 October – and also through https://thecubapress.nz/shop/

The NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship

Posted on

A few weeks ago, I heard my application for the 2022 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship had been successful – which was a wonderful surprise!

As I told the New Zealand Society of Authors when they announced the news:

“I’m honoured and delighted to receive the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship for 2022. It’s great that this fellowship recognises the importance of supporting mid-career and senior authors, and I’m honoured to follow in the footsteps of the wonderful authors who have previously received it. I’d also like to thank the judges for selecting my project, and to thank Peter Beatson and The New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc).”

“I’ll be using the funding, and the writing time it allows, to help me work on revisions to my novel in progress, which has the working title ‘Emergency Weather‘. It’s a near-future climate fiction novel that looks at what it’s like for ordinary people to be addressing – or trying to avoid addressing – the climate emergency as the weather gets more extreme, the seas rise, and politicians continue to run round in tight little circles of inaction.”

I’m very grateful to the judging panel for choosing my project. I’ve started on the revisions to my novel – it’s hard work, but I’m enjoying it. I hope to have more good news to report about “Emergency Weather” in 2023.