Novels with a New Zealand theme

Press, 9 December 1976, Page 11

Novels with a New Zealand theme

Looking at novels for Christmas? How about one with a New Zealand flavour this year. Morris West packs lots of adventure in the South Pacific into “The Navigator,” in which an old Polynesian navigator helps his grandson locate an unchartered island. Ship* wreck, tragedy and romance are involved.

M. K. Jospeh’s “A Soldier’s Tale” has been acclaimed as the best novel by a New Zealand writer in many years and is the story of a tragic war-time love, to be made into a film next year.

“The Scarecrow” is good black humour by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, an amazing and amusing story, and “New Zealand Short Stories” ($13.50) is a boxed set of three volumes by Dan Davin, C. K.

Stead and Vincent O’Sullivan. Thrillers never lose their popularity and Agatha Christie’s most recent one, “Miss Marples’s Last Case,” has a New Zealand flavour. Dick Francis sets his fifteenth thriller, “In the Frame,” in New Zealand and Australia.

“The Boys from Brazil” is a recent thriller by Ira Levin, who also wrote “Rosemary’s Baby,” and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy” is a Len Deighton spy thriller set in the Sahara, New York, Paris and Dublin.

Wilbur Smith is probably the most topical author at present, following his visit to New Zealand. “Cry Wolf” is selling at $8.85 and a volume of five of his works at $9.95 has been produced in the range that previously col-

lected works by Somerset Maugham, Nevil Shute, James Michener, John Steinbeck and George Orwell.

Leon Uris’s “Trinity” is a novel of Ireland, Irving Wallace’s “The R Docu-i ment” tells how a director of the F. 8.1. almost succeeds in taking over the American Government, Alistair Mac Lean’s “The Golden Gate” is hi twenty - first suspense novel, this time set on the famous San Franciscan bridge. Two exciting novels about sea drama are Douglas Reeman’s “Surface with Daring” and Jack Higgins’s “Storm Warning.” Reeman’s story is set in World War II and Higgins’s is an old barquentine’s bid to reach home base in Kiel from Brazil.