Lawrence & Gibson Publishing

21/01/2025

Not even our shortest release, but great seeing Sharon Lam's Lonely Asian Woman living on in the recommends for great shortish books.

Ten brilliant – and brilliantly short – books to kickstart the year.

03/01/2025

20 years in publishing. We're gonna do something of a year by year, book by book blow as and when we feel like it. Our first book was Richard Meros' On the conditions and possibilities of Helen Clark taking me as her Young Lover (2005) which was later turned into a raucously fun play that toured the country in 2007/08 by Arthur Meek and Geoff Pinfield.

The biggest beginners luck coup was when Toby Manhire, who was writing for the Guardian at the time, gave the book a short review which we mined for all the quotes we could, but which no-one really believed actually happened (see below for linx). The book is now out of print, but we nabbed this cover pic of the original hot pink version from BookHaven who have a copy of it in stock.

27/12/2024

Today Adrian is sharing his favourite reads of 2024 ✨

"2024 was a laugh. I opened the year with Tihema Baker and finished it with Brannavan Gnanalingam, both from local indie publisher Lawrence & Gibson, both outrageously funny and deeply serious takes on not being pākeha in Aotearoa. I finally caught up with le Carre’s Karla trilogy from last century and Knausgaard’s newer Morning Star sequence of novels. All my favourites had me grinning. But the best of them was Roger Lewis’s crazy love/hate bio of Burton and Taylor – a beautiful and vulgar car crash of a book."

Adrian's Books:
Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre
The Life & Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Turncoat by Tīhema Baker
A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan
James by Percival Everett
The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard

20/12/2024

It really is too late to buy from our website if you want to gift an L&G books for Christmas and even if Unity Books Wellington didn't love Bran's book we'd still direct you to get your last minute books from them... I mean, I'm not going to lie, the store is likely frenetic, but there's a happy stack of our new and old catalogue and with that I will conclude this year. Kia ora! ☺️

19/12/2024

Not bad... not bad at all... it might even end up a quote in the frontispiece in our New Year reprint!

11/12/2024

"Gnanalingam pulls us under the skin of a character that is at once loathsome, hilarious and wholly realised. It's a book for this age: a timely, incendiary, and chilling glimpse into representational politics, echo chambers and how the algorithm machine has forever changed modern democracy."

Who better to ask for their favourite books from Aotearoa now that 2024 has entered its final chapter? Kete reviewers give their thoughts. ...

07/12/2024

Check it out - Sunday Star Times feature on Brannavan's new novel!

Political satire and nihilism for the sake of power are at the centre of the Wellington lawyer’s latest book.

07/12/2024

Bran on RNZ’s Saturday Morning talking heart-attacks in your forties, the band Sparks, being inspired by The Good Soldier Svejk, sequels to Sodden Downstream, and of course The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat

Brannavan Gnanalingam is one of the first South Asian writers to be published in New Zealand. His eighth novel, a political satire is The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat. Think Veep, or Yes Minister - set in the Beehive. It's also a book about ideas, about fitting in. Brannavan Gnanalingam is an a...

06/12/2024

"No.1 - Kartik Popat is such a specific character: a friendless slacker from the Indian diaspora living in Pōneke/Wellington, self-righteous and self-loathing. How did you come up with him?" First of 5 Questions with Brannavan in Australia's Liminal Magazine

“I’m unashamedly a political writer—some people (and writers) think writing shouldn’t be political or polemical, and I have no idea who came up with that rule. Who benefits from such a rule? Not minorities.”

02/12/2024

“One of the best social and political satires I have read” - the wonderful Marion at Unity Books plumps for Kartik Popat as one of her books of the year

Throughout December and January, we are going to be sharing with you some of our booksellers best books they read this year!

"One word to describe my reading this year is local! The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is one of the best social and political satires I have read, Delirious is a dramatic, insightful and very witty, and Whaea Blue is an extremely personal wild and crazy fabulous ride of a book. So many incredible books have been published locally this year!” - Marion

Marion's Books:
When I Open the Shop by romesh dissanayake
Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall
Bad Archive by Flora Feltham
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by Brannavan Gnanalingham
Delirious by Damien Wilkins
Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn
The Royal Free by Carl Shuker
The Fight for Freshwater by Mike Joy

30/11/2024

Tremendous review of Brannavan's new novel by Angelique Kasmara at Kete. "An unspoken trope of literary fiction POC characters in our local landscape is that they might be complex but also, be ‘worthy representations’. Publishers Lawrence & Gibson threw out this memo and we’re better for it… For all the politicking, the novel itself is a joyful anarchic riot as Gnanalingam cheerfully smashes down the drawbridges to usher in a new chapter in Aotearoa New Zealand literature."

Veteran author Brannavan Gnanalingam is back with THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF KARTIK POPAT, a novel set in the world of politics. Angelique Kasmara reviews it for Kete, covering the book's definition of satire, the hilarious oddities of the s*x scenes, and how Gnanalingam upends literary tropes....

28/11/2024

First long form review in for Brannavan's new novel: "it’s to New Zealand literature’s benefit that Gnanalingam can revisit his themes of power, inequality, precarity, anger and migration in so many different registers."

Brannavan Gnanalingam’s new satire obliterates the myth of the good immigrant.

27/11/2024

Today we've got a Brannavan in his third Wellington event for The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat. Here's a GIF of the first, the launch, while the second was a Litcrawl session with Linda Clark. Today's is at 1230 at Unity Books Wellington and will go for around 45 minutes including time for questions... see ya there!

21/11/2024

Listen to Bran speak on his new novel with the delightful Neil from RadioActive.FM's Caffeine and Aspirin... "subverting the idea that minority stories have to be expressed in a model kind of way... that there's complexity and nuance and we can be just as sociopathic as anyone else..". 👀

We chat to author Brannavan Gnanalingam about his new novel, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat.

12/11/2024

Review of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat from big supporter of Aotearoa literature Alyson Baker (who also has regular reviews on the Nelson Libraries page) - “Traversing the major events in Aotearoa from the 1980s to 2024, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, is a chilling telling of the development (or lack of) of an individual and how social media has turned bumbling selfish politics into an incestuous free-for-all … The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is a brilliant political satire, but it is also a chilling cautionary tale – one that for most of the world will come too late. It ends with an incident of horrific irony, and the numbing feeling of repetition and the ongoing imbalance of power. I hope everyone reads this book.”

Kartik, a millennial hailing from Zimbabwe, migrated to Aotearoa as a child with his Gujarati father and Bengalurean mother. His parents, wary of events in Uganda and later Fiji, steer Kartik…

09/11/2024

Great seeing Brannavan Gnanalingam both interview and be interviewed at this year's Litcrawl in Te Aro courtesy of Verb Wellington. First up he talked with Saraid De Silva about her new novel, AMMA, and what home means to her and her characters. In the final session he was interviewed by Linda Clark about his own new novel, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat. We're going to be reprinting it this coming week to make sure there is enough stock for when the reviews start to drop.

01/11/2024

Brilliant dissection of a recent phenomena from Brannavan. File alongside: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

There's little to like about figures like American politician Vivek Ramaswamy, but there is a lot to learn.