Everything Is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro. Winner of the inaugural Allen and Unwin Commercial Fiction prize to try to encourage and recognise more local commercial fiction. A very worthy winner - I loved it - about Mickey Bloom who’s a shy, awkward, dyslexic kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere - and then she discovers running and it’s the one thing she’s good at. Eventually though, it all wears her don and she gives up, until after the death of her mother when it becomes cathartic. Set against the background of the Auckland marathon it’s beautifully done - I’m not a runner, never have been and never will be but I loved it. 

The Wager by David Grann. Nonfiction - In 1740, a British Man O’ War named HMS Wager set sail in search of a Spanish galleon reputed to be carrying vast amounts of treasure. An initial crew of 250 men set out but after ferocious storms around Cape Horn, running aground off Patagonia, starvation, disease and bitter infighting, only 145 survived – and many more died as one group abandoned the other and both went on to further hardship. Full of fascinating details about the workings of a Man O’ War, the miseries of their mission and the trial which came about after accusations of mutiny, it’s utterly compelling. 

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