Soho Square

by Bill Manhire

This is a fourth illustrated collection of odd pieces and extracts from memoirs, travel writing, polemic, and poetry. It seeks to mix established writers with the lesser-known, and to encourage readers to take an anarchic approach in the choice of reading material.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.

Reviews

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straight up, I fell for the first half of Soho Square and then felt cheated by the second. Bill Manhire builds this gorgeous, uneasy small-town mood, with the diner scene where everybody goes quiet at once, and then a late twist yanks the rug out in a way that feels cheap instead of clever. I'd still say read it, but go in knowing the landing's wobbly. For fans of slow, eerie mysteries. Skip if a letdown ending ruins a book for you.

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straight up, Soho Square is the reason I put my phone in another room for a whole weekend. Bill Manhire makes the case that constant tiny distractions are quietly eating our ability to do deep, satisfying work, and the chapter on "attention residue" had me noticing every time I switched tabs mid-thought. It's a little preachy near the end. For anybody who's lost an afternoon to the scroll. Skip it if you want a book that doesn't make you feel guilty.