Now to Love

Molly Conroy first learnt to drive in 1926, when she was 14. Needless to say, things were a little different back then. “When I turned 16, me and my dad just walked up to the local registration office. You just said you wanted a licence, filled out a form, handed over 10 shillings and the […]

My husband – James – and I have been married for nigh on a decade. My Mother In-Law – Jasmine – has had it in for me from day one and her feelings have barely softened in almost a decade. She made it pretty clear not long after meeting me for the first time that […]

She has come a long way from Dawson’s Creek and now actress Katie Holmes has been chosen to play one of the world’s most stylish women: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She will star alongside Little Miss Sunshine‘s Greg Kinnear who will play US president John F Kennedy in the television miniseries based on his life to […]

Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock has been through some blissful highs and devastating lows this year, but she has been keeping her greatest joy a secret. The star has revealed in an interview with People magazine that she secretly adopted a baby boy in January this year with her husband Jesse James before they split. The […]

It’s a common assumption that chocolate is a positive mood enhancer but a new US research raises the question: Does chocolate stimulate happy feelings or depression? A study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine attempted to answer that question. Researchers from the Davis and San Diego campuses of the University of California […]

Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James, Allen & Unwin, $24.99. Rebecca James has been hailed as the “next J.K. Rowling”, not because her book has anything to do with wizards, but because it was the subject of a frenzied, worldwide bidding war that pushed advances past $1million. Often, things don’t live up to the hype, but […]

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Morrow , $23.99. A fabulously turbulent family drama set in two great cities, Los Angeles and Mumbai. The two settings are almost characters themselves, the smog, the traffic jams and the teeming, chaotic nature of the East alongside the clipped lawns and somewhat antiseptic, sliced-white-bread nature of the West […]

The Winter of Our Disconnect, by Susan Maushart, Bantam $34.95. The author’s three children didn’t remember a time before email or instant messaging or Google. They didn’t just use the media, they “inhabited” it. And so Maushart embarks upon The Experiment, to live without any of it; pull the plug on the family’s entire armoury […]

Trust, by Kate Veitch, Penguin $32.95. Life can change at any given minute, so watch out. And you may think you know those you love, but you don’t. Not really. Susanna, the central character in this gripping emotional drama, learns this as her life goes into a tailspin. Not even her 20 plus years rock-solid […]

Gran’s Kitchen, by Natalie Oldfield & Dulcie May Booker, Hardie Grant Books, $45. Ninety-five-year-old Dulcie May Booker’s recipes and cooking tips have the wonderful whiff of a bygone era. Dulcie grew up in a rural farming community in Weymouth, Auckland, and started cooking as a child on her family’s coal range, winning prizes for her […]