95bFM's Loose Reads: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel

Still Born is the fourth novel from Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

The story follows the narrator, Laura, as she writes her PhD in Mexico City. While Laura decides to be surgically sterilised, her good friend Alina is undergoing IVF to conceive, but the two women’s conception of motherhood is set to keep evolving as their lives take unexpected turns.

Told in Nettel’s typically simple, unflowery prose, this is a quietly profound story about motherhood. More generally, it’s about care and the forms it might take beyond conventional roles and communities, teasing out what connects women to children and to each other.

Anyone who’s battled with the decision to have children, or looked after other peoples’ children, or even fancied themselves a feminist, will find a lot to love and think about in this honest and smart read.

95bFM's Loose Reads: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Mountain in the Sea is a thrilling new sci-fi read from Ray Nayler. Meticulously researched, crafted, and paced, Nayler brings new colour to the age-old question of what we as beings and minds are - or could be - and how we might know one another.

In a near-ish future, Ha Nguyen, a prominent marine biologist and author of 'How Oceans Think,' signs on for a research mission to a remote Vietnamese archipelago to study a dangerously intelligent new species of octopus living in the bowels of a shipwreck. The islands have been purchased by an AI tech corporation named DIANIMA, whose murky motivations Ha ignores in the opportunity of her lifetime, obsessed with deciphering the strange symbols the octopus flashes on its skin to communicate.

She is joined on the island by a highly sophisticated android named Evrim, and a war-scarred Mongolian security guard named Altantseg - each fascinating characters in their own right. Meanwhile, two subplots bubble: in Astrakhan, a hacker named Rustem attempts to find a way into the android's brain, and out in the open sea a man named Eiko, who has been captured and enslaved by a sinister automaton fishing vessel, fights for freedom.

This is a mind-bending and at times super spooky read, laced with philosophy and science surrounding the non-human mind, intelligence, and language. Pacy yet cerebral - a perfect beach read as you look out at the waves and ponder what goes on beneath.

95bFM's Loose Reads: Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

Manon reviews this ‘slippery whisper’ of a book that stays with you. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow follows a mother and daughter as they move through Tokyo. A subtle, deeply thought and artful read.

This book won the inaugural Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.

Manon phoned into the bFM studio chat to Rachel, listen below!

95bFM's Loose Reads: Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton

Morton's visceral and intimate third collection is a self-professed 'gnarly' read; gloriously jewelled sentences brim with rich and dark language - this is the work of someone who feels the sounds and visuals of words as much as their meanings. An eroding headland "gentle as a soft-shell crab, loses its meat to the tide"; a father pulls honeysuckle from "the soft brains of hydrangea". This is post-pastoral NZ gothic; trees and flowers giving way to rotting ox carcasses and deep dread.

Morton borrows like a magpie from various scientific fields to form a reality where beings and objects refuse to stay inside their boundaries. Anatomy, botany, animal and vegetable, pharmaceuticals, sickness and medicine, and heavy news headlines collide to lend new precision to our vision of a soul grappling with the unruliness and violence of their mind and body, with the edges and limits of things, and with the constant search for hope. A rich and rewarding book of poems for those who like to chew words down to the bone.

95bFM's Loose Reads: Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

Chilean Poet is a warm, soulful, hilarious novel about fatherhood, family, and of course, Chilean poetry. The tale begins with Gonzalo and Carla, who fizzle out after an awkward teenage fling in 1991, only to reunite 9 years later at a steamy Santiago night-club. Gonzalo, by now a frustrated poet and academic, moves in with Carla and her 6-year-old son Vicente, who quickly wins a spot in his heart. We follow the three of them along with their cat, Darkness, through the everyday trials and wins of family life, and what is the most tender portrait of the particularities of step-fatherhood I’ve read. Carla and Gonzalo separate, but Gonzalo leaves behind an indelible love for poetry in Vicente. 

Fast-forward another 9 years and a dreamy 18-year-old Vicente yearns to travel and write and fall in love, and refuses to go to university until education is free. Unlike Carla and Gonzalo, Vicente hasn’t grown up under Pinochet, and refuses to assume the trauma of his parents’ generation. One night he meets Pru, a lost American journalist, and urges her to chart the lesser-known poets of Chile. Her research takes her into the homes and parties and beds of an eccentric crowd of writers, forming a lively montage of Chile’s literary scene. When Pru heads home to New York, the story circles back to Vicente and Gonzalo - two beloved characters we long to see reunite.

This is the perfect winter warmer to laugh and cry over - light-hearted, meaningful, and filled with characters you wish you could meet. Without a doubt my favourite book of 2022 so far.

95bFM's Loose Reads: Time is a Lover by Ocean Vuong

Time is a Mother is the second collection from beloved poet Ocean Vuong, and his writing is as beautiful and raw and intimate as ever. Grappling with the death of his mother, as well as his own addiction, Vuong explores the grief and love and history that continues to shape him. Formally more confident than ever, these poems dance masterfully between prose, narrative, and sparse shreds, filled with Vuong's characteristically lyrical and dreamlike imagery. My personal favourite was 'Amazon History of a Nail Salon Worker' - a moving portrait of Vuong's mother in the last year of her life, composed solely from each of her mundane monthly purchases. Poetry isn't everyone's cup of tea, but Vuong is definitely one to try - there's bound to be something in here that gets you in the heart.

95bFM's Loose Reads: All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

Manon calls in from Oamaru to give her latest review!

All the Lovers in the Night (2011, trans. Sam Bett, David Boyd) is the newly translated novel from Mieko Kawakami, one of Japan’s most exciting writers.

It’s the story of Fuyuko, a 34-year-old woman working as a freelance proof-reader in Tokyo. She lives an extremely isolated, lonely life, barely leaving her apartment, bewildered by the world, yearning for connection but terrified to experience it. As the book goes on, we learn about a horrifically painful rupture in her earlier life. One day she meets Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher who shares her fascination with the properties of light, and Fuyuko begins to be seen by somebody and begin a quiet transformation. It’s a crushing heartbreaker of a book, but offers so much about the way we shape each other. As Kawakami herself has said, we don’t always find hope in light books, and we don’t always find despair in the dark ones.

Manon’s full review is with Rachel is below.

95bFM's Loose Reads: Taste Makers by Mayukh Sen

Manon joins our rotation of reviewers on 95bFM’s Loose Reads.

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women who Revolutionized Food in America is a group biography of Chao Yang Buwei, Marcella Hazan, Madeleine Kamman, Julie Sahni, Norma Shirley, Elena Zelayeta, and Najmieh Batmanglij. Through these intimate and poetic biographical sketches, Mayukh Sen pays reverent dues to long-overlooked women who have shaped America's modern culinary landscape and pioneered cuisines of their homeland. His descriptions of their foods are sublime - this is a torturous book to read while hungry!

From Zelayeta, who learned to cook again after going blind and went on to become the first Latina chef to have a televised cooking show, to Batmanglij, who self-published several Iranian cookbooks in exile, these women are beacons of determination and talent who strived to preserve their culture in the face of prejudice and erasure.

Manon’s full review with Rachel is below.