The FoodBowl, a new multi-million dollar food manufacturing facility in Auckland, has featured as a cover story in the latest issue of Exporter Magazine.

The article looks at the facility and the positive growth it will bring to small and medium sized food manufacturers. The FoodBowl provides New Zealand food developers with access to cutting edge food and beverage manufacturing technology. Pilot testing is usually reserved for larger food manufacturers due to the high costs involved; however, the new FoodBowl facility makes testing more accessible.

As well as providing leading equipment, FoodBowl has the certifications necessary to export products, opening up a whole new market for many food manufacturers.

The facility was endorsed by the government who are fully behind the company’s goal of growing food manufacturing exports by 270 percent in 2025.

The FoodBowl in Auckland has been set up by the New-Zealand Food Innovation Network and is one of four planned hubs to be set up around New Zealand.

Click here to read the full article as it appeared in Exporter magazine.

Good as Dead by Mark Billingham

It can’t be easy being a bestselling crime writer these days. With the likes of Lee Child, Val McDermid and Janet Evanovich regularly issuing two novels inside a single year, their competitors can ill afford to leave it too long between drinks – particularly if they are the architect of a complex and soulful recurring lead with a loyal fan base.

In the veritable nick of time Mark Billingham has graced us with another outing of his marvellous Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, in the affecting hostage drama Good as Dead. (Thorne’s last adventure, and his creator’s fascinating backstory, are recounted in this review of 2010’s From the Dead.)

The stakes are high. Popping into her local newsagent one south London morning, Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks is taken hostage with another man by the owner, Javed Akhtar.

Weeks and Akhtar had been collegial, even friendly, over the many months of her patronage, but what she didn’t know was that Akhtar was a man aggrieved – first by the incarceration of his teenage son Amin for his involvement in a knifing incident in which another boy died, and then over the apparent suicide of Amin by drug overdose in his youth prison’s hospital wing.

Akhtar believes his son a murder victim, and Helen Weeks is the leverage he will use to force the metropolitan police to prove it. He has chosen wisely: Weeks is not only herself an officer, in the Child Protection Unit, she also knows Thorne, who is drafted into the team of investigators assigned to the case.

More poignantly, she is the single mother of a young son, and as the hours tick by, her determination not to leave him parentless manifests in a total loss of trepidation about manipulating both Akhtar and her sometimes hapless colleagues through the regular phone calls her captor permits. The separate workings of Weeks’ and Thorne’s minds, as the former struggles to contain Akhtar’s emotional, erratic state and Thorne painstakingly sources the information the stricken father seeks, are a joy to behold.

Where Billingham has particularly excelled is in the clever beading together of disparate criminal elements: first, the provocation of Amin and resulting death; then an alleged sexual attack in prison that is given as the motive for Amin’s suicide; Javed’s highly illegal reaction to the loss of his son; and the generic, miserable murk of Amin’s fellow jailbirds, one by one tracked down by Thorne’s team for their accounts of his life inside – and what he was doing out so late on the fateful night, having told his parents he was studying.

At nearly 400 pages, Good as Dead is dense but well-paced – Billingham is far too skilled a storyteller not to use the race-against-the-clock premise to its best advantage. It would be easy to tell such a story clinically and let the discovery of the ‘truth’ about Amin be the dramatic payoff, but that would be to waste the three people in a room (one with a loaded gun), the lost child and anchorless father, the brilliant cop with emotional burdens that he daren’t cast off. The resolution is serious, moving and allows everyone concerned to preserve their dignity.

A real day in Thorne’s world would see most of us carted off in a stretcher, but it sure is fun to visit.

3 / 5 stars: It’s Tom Thorne’s world – we just live in it.

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The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman

Is there anything as sure to provoke tears as a Holocaust drama? Towards the end of Alyson Richman’s The Lost Wife I was a bundle of frayed nerves and impatience, eager to see how she handled the moments after the reunion shown in the opening chapters, but fretting, as the pages wound down, that there wasn’t space to do so satisfyingly.

Whether you are sated will depend on your appetite for extreme romantic ordeals. Josef and Lenka are young Czech Jews who meet in the late 1930s, as the shadow of Nazi Germany is lengthening across Europe, and Jewish families, heretofore strangers to anti-Semitism, become the objects of rapidly intensifying race hatred in their businesses and communities.

Lenka has grown up happily, the daughter of a glass dealer and housewife. Her parents’ marriage is exceptionally happy, her mother beautiful and her father’s business thriving. The only strain comes from their difficulty conceiving a sibling for Lenka, but all is resolved when, at seven, she becomes the elder sister to Marta.

Meanwhile, Josef is the scion of a family of equal stability but lesser warmth: his autocratic father, a respected obstetrician, dominates Josef’s cowed mother and is unduly harsh in his treatment of his diligent, accomplished son. The family’s bright light is Veruska, Josef’s younger sister, a friend of Lenka’s at the Prague Academy of Art and the engineer of the pair’s meeting.

Their chemistry is immediate, and love, of a wholesome, idyllic kind, blossoms. They are just 16 and 20, and each other’s first love: neither has been sullied by ugly experience. This is important, for the combination of the relationship’s purity and its brevity makes each partner the other’s flawless fantasy over the many decades they spend apart.

After marrying quickly, with war impending, they spend only a few days together before Josef and his family leave for England, en route to the United States. The arrangement had been that Josef’s cousin in the US would secure visas for Lenka and her family, but Lenka learns that there is passage only for her: she will have to leave her parents and sister behind. Knowing that she couldn’t bear the guilt of doing so, she refuses.

She and Josef exchange letters, plan their reunion . . . and then she learns from a newspaper report that Josef’s ship from Liverpool was attacked by a German U-boat. He and his family are listed, incorrectly, among the dead. Josef scours post-war documents for news of Lenka – whose life in concentration camps is unflinchingly, and lengthily, depicted by Richman – and comes to believe she too has perished.

Both marry others and raise families, finding safety but no peace. Richman diligently tracks their stories down the years, but what we’re waiting for is the resolution to the exceptional instant she affords us at the novel’s start, when an elderly couple crosses paths at the New York wedding of her granddaughter and his grandson. There is something familiar about her. He takes her arm, pushes up her sleeve to find a six-number tattoo, and he knows she is his Lenka, his lost wife.

Though there is rediscovery, The Lost Wife is the story of nearly intolerable loss, told with delicacy and empathy.

3 / 5 stars: Melodramatic and harrowing.

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The Lovers by Vendela Vida

San Francisco writer Vendela Vida’s The Lovers is a classic slow-burner. The premise is simple: an American woman, two years widowed, journeys back to the idyllic seaside town in Turkey where she honeymooned 28 years earlier.

She is due to spend nine days at a rented house in Datça before meeting her son Matthew and his fiancée on a cruise. The companionship of Matthew’s erstwhile sister Aurelia, whose troubles with addiction were a source of shame for her parents, is unconfirmed. But upon arrival in Datça, Yvonne’s well-laid plans are set awry by the disinterment of memories and the appearance of her peculiar landlord Ali and his erratic wife Ozlem.

The first thing that occurred to me on finishing the book was that I still didn’t know who ‘the lovers’ were – on the face of it, there aren’t any to be found. Presumably the title refers to Yvonne and Peter on their Datça honeymoon, an event on which Yvonne reflects only intermittently, instead dwelling at more length on the beginning and end of their relationship.

Indeed, Vida’s imagining of the pair’s not-so-chance meeting is the loveliest passage in a book where most of the beauty is found in the writer’s delicate recreation of the coastal environs, the scent of the air and ocean and the flora. (The time Vida spent in Turkey to prepare the novel was well spent.)

None of the other couples are easily seen as lovers, and most are glimpsed only from a distance – we never meet Matthew and his betrothed, or Aurelia’s boyfriend. On a boating trip Yvonne encounters Carol and Jimson, a disengaged but reflexively polite couple with whom Yvonne reluctantly exchanges contact details at the end of the day, knowing that “their time on Cleopatra’s Island, and her story of Peter’s death, would blur into other stories they heard and movies they saw – if they remembered any detail at all.”

Such vagueness permeates – some might say maims – The Lovers. (At times I found myself peering at the pages, trying to make out precisely what Vida was seeking to express.) She sets up potential sub-plots that never quite come to fruition, such as the peculiar relationship between Ali and Ozlem (another of the non-lovers). Yvonne’s discovery of a sex toy in the quiet house is followed by a series of unannounced visits by each, but the embryonic storyline is discarded without a satisfying resolution.

It is as if she had one idea for her story, but cast it aside when she happened upon a more interesting relationship, the one set up halfway through the novel between Yvonne and Ahmet, a young local boy who makes a living as a shell collector. It is their meeting that prompts the single dramatic event of the novel, and shatters the air of nostalgia and muffled grief that threatens to swamp it.

Vida is a writer of exceptional capacity, which in The Lovers serves to outshine her characters. Don’t be surprised if you are left with a strange yearning for the sea.

2.5 / 5 stars: Written with rare beauty, The Lovers leaves you feeling that something has eluded you.

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The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid by Catherine Robertson

Once in a while I happen upon a book that is so mood-lifting, so stonkingly readable and plain fun, that I finish it feeling the urge to surreptitiously drop copies everywhere I go, like a compulsive literary-litterer. When such a book is penned by a Kiwi and therefore just cause for a moment of patriotic pride, it’s all the sweeter.

Though that adjective crops up in the title, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid avoids becoming saccharine through the deft application of wit and the resolute refusal of the heroine to take anything – including her own grief – too seriously.

Romance novelist Darrell – no, she doesn’t know why her parents chose that name either – is in her mid-30s and has been married for 10 years when her husband Tom drops dead from a heart attack immediately after completing a half-marathon.

Stunned and anchorless, Darrell flees New Zealand for London, where she encounters the first in a perfectly cast parade of supporting characters who add spice and depth to what will become her second life. Darrell strikes a discounted rental deal for a mid-renovation townhouse in Islington, and finds Clare, her hormonally-imbalanced five-months’-pregnant landlady, oscillating comically between tears, fits of jealousy and wild accusations of criminality directed at hapless tradesmen.

In the neighbourhood coffee shop, a haven for lonely and embattled souls, the plot thickens. Darrell espies two intriguing characters who earn the secret nicknames Mr Perfect and Miss Flaky. Upon being formally introduced to each, she strikes up a friendship with Mr Perfect – Claude, short for Claudius (the nameplay continues; Claude’s siblings are Augusta and Marcus).

Marcus, compelling in a way playboy characters rarely are, softens some of the edges of Darrell’s grief, but the hard work is hers alone to do. We know he’s not quite the right fit, and that if the book is as good on the final page as it promises to be throughout, Robertson will find the perfect resolution. She does.

With the confidence of a seasoned scribe, Robertson knows just where to direct her pen, and her choice of Darrell’s occupation gives her reason to reflect on the subtle distinctions of the genre: “Category romances are sold as a packaged line, each identified by a name like Captivate or Smouldering Liaisons, which is essentially a key to how filthy the books are.”

Occasional email exchanges between Darrell and her married-with-children best friend Michelle are alone worth the retail price:

DARRELL: He’s invited me to a garden party.

LADY MO: At Bucky Palais? Yeepers! Get out your hat!

Billed by the publisher as a romantic comedy in the chick-lit genre, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid does tick those boxes . . . but I’m reluctant to see it categorized too sternly in case it causes some to pass it by. For it’s hard to see how the book could have been any better, more assured or engaging. Robertson is a new national treasure.

3.5 / 5 stars: Astonishingly good. A new Kiwi treasure has been found.

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Goddess of Love by P C Cast

Any genre mash-up risks making unwitting comedy, but the practiced hand of American writer P C Cast lends an air of plausibility to the most unlikely of proceedings (Greek gods descending from Mount Olympus to find their true loves in the American Midwest?).

Earlier books in Cast’s ‘Goddess Summoning’ series have seen mortals elevated to the realm of the gods, but in this fifth installment, Goddess of Love, the fantasy and paranormal romance scribe turns the tables. Here we find that high-profile goddess – known to the Greeks as Venus and the Romans as Aphrodite – lonely and dissatisfied in her marriage of amicable convenience to Vulcan, the god of fire.

Meanwhile, back on Earth Dorreth Chamberlain, known as Pea, is flailing. A resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma (where the author lives when not in Grand Cayman Island or Scotland), Pea has a plum job as director of the city’s community college’s continuing education department, but harbours unrequited lust for a spunky local firefighter, Griffin, whom she meets when he rescues her Scottish terrier from a tree. (The pup who thinks she’s a cat is something of a standing joke, and comes in handy when Venus needs to convince Pea of her immortal and omnipotent status.)

The goddess and the human meet following a chance trip to Borders where, seeking inspiration, Pea happens upon a book titled Discover the Goddess Within – Unleash Venus and Open Your Life to Love, by a writer with the portentous name of Juno Panhellenius. Pea opens the pages, utters a goddess-summoning invocation, and Venus is shortly thereafter at her elbow, vowing as bidden to bring happiness and ecstasy into her life.

Handily, Venus knows what to expect from her earthly descent and is able to settle in fast, having earlier been clued in to the characteristics of modern cities by Persephone, who has been taking diverting mini-breaks in Tulsa via a portal kept open by her mother Demeter (precisely why is not clear).

As Pea and Venus set to the ecstasy task, Vulcan, observing from Mount Olympus, develops a crush on the hapless mortal. Then Venus meets Griffin, and sparks fly. Cue what is surely one of the most raunchy, comical and inventively absurd parties ever to feature in the young-adult-skewed-fantasy-paranormal-romance-set-in-Oklahoma canon, when Venus has an impassioned encounter with Griffin and Pea becomes the delighted object of Vulcan’s ardent attentions.

Things get briefly sticky when Pea learns of Venus’ betrayal and all characters are confronted with the apparently insurmountable hurdle of the fact of human mortality, but Cast does a fine job of maintaining a largely light tone, thanks in part to her wry observations about the eccentricities of 21^st century life (Venus, fond of dispensing and consuming ambrosia, is puzzled when Pea talks of ‘taking a Xanax’, but reassured when it is described to her as ‘ambrosia in a pill’).

Fans of the Goddess Summoning series will no doubt find it pleasing, and newcomers are likely to be both surprised and amused by the explicit extent of the toga-ripping. Entertained new readers should note that this volume was published in the US in 2007 and the series has since seen three further additions.

2 / 5 stars: Strictly for young adults.

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Before the Poison by Peter Robinson

In the depths of winter, nothing beats a mind-bending detective story, and happily, August brings a new edition from one of the best operators in the game. At first, Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison appears to tread familiar ground – lonely man moves into moody old Yorkshire countryside manor and becomes embroiled in decades-old local mystery – but soon we are being led through uncharted thickets and bramble. Is it a psychological thriller? The cracking of a cold case? The tale of a woman wronged?

It’s all of the above, and more. For starters, there’s the tragic glamour of the premise. Lovely and capable Grace Fox is reminiscent of a Douglas Sirk heroine, with her triumphant wartime nursing exploits, her much older doctor husband and young son, and her management of a large, impressive home, Kilnsgate House.

The first sign that the wheels are off emerges one grim New Year’s Day evening when, following a dinner party at their home, Ernest Fox succumbs to what appears to be a massive heart attack. The misery is compounded by the fact that Grace and her dinner guests are snowed in with the corpse for two days before the alarm can be raised, and matters take a turn for Hades proper when it is revealed that Grace has been having an affair with a younger local man, and an autopsy raises questions about the manner of death.

The Crown avers that Grace poisoned her husband in order to be with her lover, the jury convicts, and in 1953 40-year-old Grace is hanged.

The present-day story begins with Christopher Lowndes, an Oscar-winning composer of film scores, buying Kilnsgate House from a mystery seller. Leeds-born, Lowndes has lived in Los Angeles for the past 35 years, raising two children there with his wife Laura, whose death has prompted a return to his homeland.

Setting him up in the house is Heather Barlow, attractive, 15 years his junior and in a joyless marriage. Naturally, some frivolities ensue, but more importantly, Heather furnishes Lowndes with the aforementioned historical data, and there is only one thing for a lonely, inquisitive widower of means and unusual sensitivity to do – figure out whether Grace did it, whether she was framed or the pathologist was mistaken, or if some other oddness is at work.

The inquiry takes Lowndes from Richmond, Yorkshire to South Africa and rural France, as a series of colourful supporting characters is sought out and delicately drilled for information about Grace and her life with Ernest. Each yields valuable clues. The careful pacing makes reading Before the Poison feel at times like opening the cardboard doors of an advent calendar – a treat, and a step closer to paydirt.

The brilliance of the novel lies in Robinson’s refusal to ever allow his reader to feel the ground is stable. Not only is it difficult to pinpoint a genre, it is impossible to predict what conclusion Lowndes will reach about Grace, or what his ultimate discovery will do to him.

Equally, only the most jaded will find themselves unmoved by Grace’s story. Before the Poison constitutes the perfect balance of journey and destination, and is another triumph for the masterful Robinson.

3 / 5 stars: Eerie and unforgettable.

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Having announced his resignation as CEO of Wellington Cricket in September, former New Zealand cricket international Gavin Larsen is now able to reveal what he is planning to do next – go to HELL.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. His family will be with him. With his wife Karen and two of their three children, Corey (18) and Vanessa (16), Mr Larsen is taking over the HELL Pizza store in Wellington’s Newlands, the family’s home suburb.

Though their first day isn’t until 26 October, HELL Newlands is already a family business of sorts. Corey, recently back from a season of league cricket in the UK, previously worked there as a delivery driver, and Vanessa has served as front-of-house for the past year.

Mr Larsen says the transition from sport to business came about naturally. “We’ve been involved in small business before, having owned and run Larsen Sportswear for about eight years in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I enjoyed the dynamics of that and wanted to get back into it. And with Wellington Cricket, as CEO you need to cover all the business bases, from marketing and HR to the financial side, and ideally you need that breadth of skill-set and experience to pick up and grow a small business.”

The HELL connection was equally organic, with the Wellington-bred cult company being one Mr Larsen has long admired. “I got to know the owners Stu [McMullin] and Callum [Davies] when HELL came on board last year as sponsor of the Wellington Firebirds Twenty20 cricket team. I was impressed with their attitude to the sponsorship and with their dedication and commitment to moving the brand forward. It’s a fun and cheeky company to get involved in.”

Visitors to the store are likely to see Mr Larsen in action. In his view, owning a business means understanding all aspects of it, and getting “down and dirty” in every part of HELL Newlands alongside his experienced staff, who he inherited from the previous owner and says he is lucky to have.

Important too is quality control, including the sampling of all new products: for the record, the self-described “meat man” is a fan of the bestselling Lust (pepperoni, salami, ham, bacon and cabanossi), and Cursed (ham, gherkins, chicken, bacon and smoked cheddar), and reports that he recently learned how to make a tasty Mordor (smoky BBQ sauce, pepperoni, chicken, capsicum and bacon) to pleasing effect.

Will he miss cricket? “Cricket and sport are in my blood. With Cricket Wellington it simply felt the right time to move on – structurally it’s in great shape and it was a good time for a new leadership voice. I’d be surprised though if downstream if I wasn’t back involved in cricket in some way. But we’re taking it all one step at a time. Karen and I want to throw ourselves into the venture wholeheartedly and enjoy the business as a family. We hope to make a success, then we’ll see what transpires.”

On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry

Almost as soon as I put down my completed copy of Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, my hunch that it would be judged widely pleasing was borne out when it was listed alongside 12 others on the annual Man Booker Prize longlist. It is not the first time Barry has been in the running for the Commonwealth’s most prestigious prize for fiction: he was shortlisted in 2005 for A Long Long Way and again three years later for The Secret Scripture.

The multitalented (plays, novels and poetry) Irishman is due, and On Canaan’s Side would be a worthy laureate not least because it handles the complex subject of grief with rare economy, while showing the seismic power of sudden and premature loss.

The protagonist is the elderly Lilly Bere, a Chicagoan who was forced to flee Dublin with her doomed fiancé at the end of the First World War. On Canaan’s Side opens in the immediate aftermath of the suicide of her 20-something grandson, Bill, and proceeds through her experience of grief until its arresting halt 17 days later.

Which is not to say it is all about Bill – in fact the narrative, stark in content yet laden with Barry’s usual lovely wordcraft, evokes a sombre, reflective mood largely through a series of flashbacks that constitute a biography of Lilly’s 89 years. The loss of Bill – her only surviving relative – is one more in a series, and the story of her endurance of it is powerful in its simplicity. There are few who can craft something so remarkable out of the most ordinary, and Barry lets none of the effort that must have been required be perceived.

Lilly’s life has been no pretty picture. She has lost a homeland, a brother and son to war, and a not-quite-husband to civilian bullets. Her son Ed, though alive, is buried in the post-traumatic stress of Vietnam, and his toddler proves Lilly’s saviour as she devotes her later years to raising him. But Bill’s life unfolds as if in mirthless mimicry of his grandmother’s, and by his early 20s he has emerged from his own divorce and a stint in the second Gulf War. It is as if Lilly’s steeliness loses its potency down the generations, with Ed retaining his life if not his sanity, and Bill proving unable to cling to either.

Throughout, Barry’s prose is jaw-dropping, and the beauty of his writing – “those long-limbed creaturely fogs that walk in against the Hamptons like armies, whether attacking or defeated, whether going out or returning home is hard to say” – will surely contribute to his elevation once more to the Booker shortlist. Indeed, war is a prominent theme, both as a literal reference and perhaps a metaphorical allusion to the daily, subconscious practice of guarding against death.

The ending cannot be objectively defined as either happy or sad, but it is entirely natural. The final lesson of On Canaan’s Side may be that one is never too old or world-weary to elude devastation, and that an aged heart, its defenses weakened by life, is perhaps the kind most afflicted by sorrow.

4 / 5 stars: There might well be a Booker in it.

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The German Boy by Patricia Wastvedt

It is in 1947 London that Patricia Wastvedt opens her latest novel, The German Boy, with Stefan Landau, “this white-skinned, bruise-eyed German”, landing in Dover and journeying to London to be met by his aunt, Elisabeth, the sister of Stefan’s English mother, Karen.

Elisabeth is apprehensive at the arrival of this near-stranger, and for good reason – 16-year-old Stefan, enigmatic, taciturn and only recently freed from the Hitler Youth’s death grip, can barely hide his disdain for his English relatives, the only family he still has. In this, he is very much his father’s son, and the story of what became of his Fuhrer-loving parents in Nazi Germany is just one of the narrative pearls Wastvedt plants for her reader to prise out as they make their way through this rich, absorbing novel.

Stefan remains oblivious to the (perhaps typical) messiness of his family’s evolution since the end of the First World War, but the more fortunate reader has the pleasure of returning, from this opening, to 1927. Here is introduced the novel’s pivotal character, a young artist named Michael Ross, who will become both subject and cause of sisterly obsession and the estrangement of Karen and Elisabeth.

Michael’s family is damaged in a way not unusual for the time: his father Albert was severely disabled in a 1917 mustard attack in France and is cared for by Michael’s mother Vera. Michael’s Jewish ancestry, though it’s of no consequence to the Rosses or their acquaintances, will become a matter of great import later in the story, when Karen (whom, he met, along with Elisabeth, through his sister Rachel in their school years) introduces him to her thoroughly propagandized German husband.

The beastly Artur Landau is a well-drawn, grim echo of the many willing servants of the Third Reich. Karen is in love with him and is thrilled to give birth to their son, but their marriage is one of convenience (not least because, by this reviewer’s reading, Awful Artur doesn’t bat for Karen’s team). As menacing as the Fuhrer himself, Artur’s actions catalyze much of the fast-moving second half of the story, which leaps from the early 1930s and the establishment of Nazi Germany to 1947, following the divergence of Karen and Elisabeth’s familial paths. These passages, crafted with imagination and empathy, make The German Boy an historical novel that is a cut above the rest.

Wastvedt demonstrates a remarkable knack for evoking the many small kindnesses and unexpected fellowships that bolstered the bruised survivors of two unholy wars. One character, striking up a conversation with a night porter at a train station one chilly evening, ends up giving the virtual stranger 20 acres of land he owns in the Romney Marsh.

Years later that kind man becomes Elisabeth’s husband, and we can see that event owes more to her recognition of her need for his goodness than to romantic love. But this is Wastvedt’s point – there is no horror in the mundanity of the everyday, when you have seen the alternatives.

3.5 / 5 stars: A family’s story, told with delicacy and daring.

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