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

This week, Louise answers a reader request:

Kia ora Reading Doctor

I would love to receive a personalised reading list. I am interested in books or stories by Pasifika writers about cultural identity, family ties and history.

Many thanks
Vitoria

Hi Vitoria,

I hope there’s something in this list that appeals and is new to you.

· The Beats of the Pa‘u carry narratives of culture to Cook Islanders far from home, living to a different beat in New Zealand, in the collection of linked short stories by Maria Samuela.

· Ancestry is a collection of short stories by Albert Wendt which explores the nature of family, tradition and culture through the eyes of those seemingly caught between the realities of modern contemporary life and the ancestral ties of their heritage. Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A Writer’s Early Life is a memoir which examines the way Wendt’s personal history has shaped his writing life.

· Displaced Leila sets out to discover her heritage in Telesa: The Covenant Keeper by Lani Wendt Young, finding herself embraced by a powerful sisterhood of elemental guardians; it’s the beginning of a contemporary YA series which incorporates ancient Pacific mythology.

· The powerful relationship between a mother and daughter is the subject of the novel Frangipani by Célestine Hitiura Vaite, set in Tahiti.

· Connected by the literal and metaphoric juxtaposition of cold and heat, the collection of stories in Black Ice Matter by Gina Cole are often dark portrayals of contemporary life in the South Pacific.

· A collection of academic essays which explore the meaning of home and the effect of dominant societies on indigenous ones, Home: Here to Stay is edited by Marilyn McPherson, Linitā Manuʻatu and Mere Kēpa.

· The Smell of the Moon by American Samoan novelist Lemanatele Mark Kneubuhl, celebrates a return to a family and a community, in which a quest for one’s origins is both joyous and difficult.

· Describing the life of a fictitious Samoan village through the eyes of an adolescent girl, each poised between the past and the future, Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged uses lyrical and dreamlike prose to evoke a traditional form of story-telling.

· The poetry of Tusiata Avia is concerned with themes of cross-cultural interaction, of the meeting point between traditional and contemporary life, and the relationship between place and self: in Bloodclot, the Samoan goddess of war leaves the underworld to wander the earth as a girl from Christchurch.