Barbara Anderson - Books

Barbara Anderson treats her readers like favored guests. She entertains with skill and panache; she is never boring or long-winded, and she subtly flatters us by implying that we share her worldly and trenchant views on certain types of human beings. She charms us with words.
Sue McCauley LISTENER & TV TIMES

Her first collection of short stories, I Think We Should Go into the Jungle (1989), shortlisted for the Wattie Award (1989) and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1990), demonstrated a dramatist’s acute sense of dialogue and timing, together with a shrewdly observant understanding of human behaviour and was a successful challenge to stylistic conventions.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

Girls High (1990) can be described structurally as a serial novel that consists of linked short stories. There is again, a keen sense of the absurdity of human behaviour. The resulting comedy is, however, touched with compassion.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

As 1991 writing fellow at Victoria University, Anderson completed the more intricate Portrait of the Artist's Wife (1992). Winner of the Wattie Award (1992), and a more sustained, complex work of fiction, this spans forty years with settings in ‘the Bay', Wellington, London and Europe. The humour is more muted and the story of Sarah Tandy struggling to develop her own artistic talent in spite of the inhibiting environment of 1950s New Zealand and the demands of marriage and family, is told with gently wry understanding of the bewildering complexity of human relationship.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

In The House Guest (1995) Anderson digs more deeply into the layers of human behaviour, challenging readers with the experience of love and loss, and the subsequent unexpected dilemmas. The novel differs in many ways from her earlier work, particularly in its reversal of readers' early expectations. Located in 1990s New Zealand, its comedy is not as broad, the focus deliberately diffused. If, in her earlier books form shaped content, in this novel, set in Wellington and Central Otago, the reverse is true. The scope is broader and the plot more ambitious in its deliberate use of uncertainty and suspense.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

The popular All the Nice Girls (1993) exemplifies her talent for wise and witty encapsulation of her diverse experiences, including acute observation of naval society, gained during her nomadic life as wife of a senior naval officer. Again, a network of relationships is undercut by the tension between public and private lives, within the clearly established, neatly detailed context of 1960s New Zealand.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

Proud Garments (1996) weaves a tragicomic story between Auckland and Milan. The intricate relationships are carefully woven; married love is wryly shown to be a composite of pride, passion and regret, loyalty, deceit and compromise. The differing perspectives of young and old and their equally inevitable failings are depicted with merciless clarity, and yet there is, as always in Anderson's work, a sense of empathy and understanding.From the Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature

The Peacocks and other stories (1997), Anderson’s second collection of short stories, follows the remarkably successful 1989 collection I think we should go into the jungle, which was compared to Flaubert and Patrick White and was reprinted three times within a year.NZ Book Council

Long Hot Summer (1999) is set in 1936, at the beginning of a long, unshadowed summer, when a group of families gathers at the Beach. To enliven their lazy days, James Clements - the most handsome man in the Bay - decides to shoot an amateur cowboy film. James enlists the expertise of local Maori along with the holidaymakers. In doing so, he brings two worlds into collision, and lights the fuse to emotions whose explosion will astonish them all.NZ Book Council

Anderson's novel The Swing Around (2001) tells the story of the Minister of Cultural Links and Trade setting off on a Sing Around of New Zealand's Asian friends and neighbours. It should be routine affair, but his wife doesn't like shopping, his two assistants are ill at ease and the terrorist group Lightening Storm lurks in the background.NZ Book Council

Change of Heart (2003). Oliver Gurth Perkins is 75, and the darkest cloud on his horizon is that the local bookshop no longer stocks collected volumes of the Times cryptic crosswords. He has an easy companionship with his wife; his dental practice is undemanding; his son is a decent enough sort; and his granddaughter who comes for the school holidays is a delight. But when a minor heart episode convinces Oliver that it's time to put a little more time into the lives of those close to him, further shocks are in store . . .NZ Book Council

This publication collects work previously published in I think we should go into the jungle and The Peacocks and also some unpublished stories.

Barbara tells her story.