Dear Sweet Harry : paperback

Dear Sweet Harry is Lynn Jenner's first collection - the autobiography of an obsession linking the author's own family history with that of two famous deceivers, Harry Houdini and Mata Hari.

In an act of imaginative will Jenner assembles 'factions' and ephemera, poems and scraps that summon other diverse characters, objects and places: France, ham radio, World War I, trains, TB, her grandfather Harry (who saw Houdini perform in London), Katherine Mansfield and Paraparaumu.

The pieces include family memories and tokens - a letter to her grandfather, a recipe for cough mixture - as well as detritus from other lives.

Dear Sweet Harry is a tender and virtuoso 'Hey presto!' with a global reach and an offbeat charm unlike anything else in New Zealand literature.