Summer reads 2025: Recommendations from Auckland Central City Library

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Image: Reading in bed at Alton Ave. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1207-0455. Photographer: Ronald Clark.

Summer is upon us and are librarians are delighted to share what pukapuka moved them this year. Fellow research librarian Rin has asked the Central City Librarians and Research Librarians what pukapuka blew them away in 2025. The list suggested below have a local and global connection to Aotearoa. Most importantly, they are all available at Auckland Libraries for all of us to read. 

E maru ina tau! Here are our offerings:

Image: Cyclists reading at Aotea Square. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 273-PAG047-07. Photographer: Stuart Page.

A lovingly produced, long overdue biography of painter Tony Fomison. A pity it lacks reproductions of his paintings, with their doom chord atmospheres - check out the holy, deep tomb rumblings of 'Study of Holbein's 'Dead Christ' at the Auckland Art Gallery - but is still an admirable struggle with the legacy of a complex man and an ambitious, gifted artist.


 A remarkable memoir of Dr Timoti Te Moke. With a horrific childhood, gang and prison life, nothing stopped him from becoming a qualified doctor at the age of 56. What an inspirational story for everyone. If you have the will to succeed in life, nothing can stop you.




Light in Gaza emphasizes future-focused thinking, imagining a life beyond colonialism. Home to 2 million people, Gaza continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by the occupiers. It represents a collective effort to amplify Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle.


Image: A man reading at St James theatre. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 273-WES215-02. Photographer: Ans Westra.

This year I really enjoyed reading Becoming Aotearoa : a new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave - it was a big undertaking but well worth the effort! It is accessibly written and divided up into easily digestible podcast sized chapters. The last few chapters confirm how difficult it is to write about recent times from a historical perspective.

One of the sentences that has stuck with me the most is that Sir George Grey, initial benefactor of our library, presided over the alienation of more Māori land than the rest of the nineteenth-century governors and premiers and their twentieth-century successors combined.




‘A Writer’s Life’ is set in Southland and Otago. Born in Invercargill in 1919, third daughter to Frank and Minnie Mumford. Ruth Dallas observed her world and wrote until her death in 2008. Morrow’s biography draws on Dallas’ papers in the Hocken Collections, using her notebooks and archives to follow her life as a writer of poetry and children’s books. Dallas was under-represented in the critical anthologies of New Zealand poets in the twentieth century, but she was always widely read and enjoyed for her close observation. She was self-taught but received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Otago, along with her friend Janet Frame in 1978. 

Ruth Dallas: A Writer’s Life makes a timely companion volume to This moment, every moment: collected poems the new edition of her collected poems, (OUP, 2025) and her autobiography Curved horizon (1991). Many of the illustrations in Morrow’s book show Ruth at work – opening with Joanna Margaret Pauls’s portrait, ‘Ruth Dallas seated in an armchair reading a book’ (1979) which is also reproduced on the back cover in colour. Sample her titles Walking on snow (Caxton Press 1976) and The Joy of a Ming Vase (2006) to get a sense of the poet’s voice, and enjoy this:

“Words break out of us,

We are made of words as leaves

Make sheltering trees.”

~"Haiku vii" (Collected Poems OUP, 2000)




“On a scale of one to ten, how African do you feel?” Omar asks himself as he navigates life in cold, windy, prickly ol’ Wellington. Hana Pera Aoake, in her interview recommended this poignant and beautiful debut novel by Khadro Mohamed. And I’m so glad she did! It’s an astro-sensory read. Mohamed gives you a taste of life in Aotearoa as a young person from a migrant family uprooted from their parent’s culture, language and land while having to inevitably suss out who they are and where they belong in the spaces in between. Take a soul dive into the whakapapa of memory! A grounding and beautifully afferent read! 



So this is very loosely related to NZ, but is available in our lib collection, and technically I first read it like, two years ago, but it has stuck with me and I re-read it again this year! It has a chapter or two on the Christchurch earthquake recovery, and is just a really interesting, if somewhat traumatising, read on disaster recovery, particularly relevant considering the world is hurtling towards bigger and badder climate catastrophes all the time.



Read as an eAudiobook on Libby. I love McCullough's biographies so much - he makes great figures of history seem so human. I loved his portrayal of the two down-to-earth, humble, hardworking brothers. Fun fact! When Neil Armstrong made his historical landing on the moon, he had in his pocket a piece of muslin from a 1903 flyer built by the Wright Brothers. Isn't that such a remarkable tribute to the passage of science? 


Image: Richard Pearse aeroplane, MOTAT, 1980. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1528-80027. Photographer: JB Rowntree.


Incredibly insightful to hear the political commentary and analysis of those actually on the ground. I connected to the parallels drawn to the Algerian revolution and references to Frantz Fanon's 'Wretched Of The Earth' in the first essay. And it came full circle as the last essay spoke on indigenous relationships with colonization and occupation throughout the world, referencing Aotearoa specifically.


Enjoy reading these books and wishing you a warm and peaceful summer e hoa mā. Thank you for visiting and we look forward to seeing you again in the new year. Aroha mai. Aroha atu.

Image: Young man reading Queen Street. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 273-PAG027-10. Photographer: Stuart Page. 



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