Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions.

Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

Our first prescription for 2022 features novels that have made a strong impression on our Reading Doctor.

First impressions

Sometimes, a debut novel makes a lasting impression on the literary landscape. These are some which have made a mark on mine.

- Romilly is The Illustrated Child in the book by Polly Crosby, a child whose unusual life is fictionalised in a series of picture books written and illustrated by her father, in which he hides secrets for her to discover as she grows up.

- Longlisted for the Orange Prize, Haven Kimmel’s The Solace of Leaving Early is a love story set in the small American town to which Langston returns after a decade out in the big wide world.

- Nine-year-old Solly is a loner in her small South Otago community, imagining the histories which lie unacknowledged in the anonymous paupers’ graves at her local cemetery, in How to Stop a Heart from Beating by Jackie Ballantyne.

- The Lisbon girls are five mysterious and doomed sisters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ book The Virgin Suicides, adapted into a film directed by Sofia Coppola, in her directorial debut.

- In northern Iceland in 1829, a convicted murderess awaits her execution in Donna Kent’s Burial Rites, a heartbreaking tale of injustice based on a true story.

- Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, has been described as a “thinking person’s thriller”, telling the story of a group of murderous classics students.

- Distinguished as the first writer to win the Booker Prize for a debut novel, Keri Hulme struggled to get The Bone People published at all; it describes what happens when the solitary Kerewin meets a traumatised child, Simon.

- Winner of the Booker Prize in 2013, Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre is subtitled “A 21^st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death”, a satirical examination of suburban America and the media in the aftermath of a school shooting, featuring a teenager with an unfortunate talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

- Betsy tells her story from the confines of a sanitarium, in Louise Wareham Leonard’s Since You Ask, confronting the destructive secrets of her outwardly successful family.

- Susanna Clarke offers an alternative history in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which magic has returned to 19^th-century England, for which she won the Hugo Award.