It’s that time of the year! You grow old, you grow poorer especially if you’re like me and love showering yourself with gifts, but that’s another story..

This one is about gifts you’re lucky enough to get from other people. Mary got me a book subscription from Wellington company Good Books; you simply fill up a short questionnaire about what stuff you read, and someone picks out something you’d like. Leila is already doing this for me (!), but this time, I’m committed to reading it because you get a new book every month.

So I’ve starting out with an Aotearoa author, Bryan Walpert.

The novel Entanglement has been shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2022, and is about ‘a memory-impaired time traveller attempting to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1977 when, panicked, he abandons his brother on a frozen lake in Baltimore.’