FROM THE EDITOR

Status: currently bingeing on the Netflix series Wallander. It’s excellent, with Kenneth Brannagh as the lead detective – a talented investigator, but one who cannot separate his life from work, obsessed with case after case, drinking heavily, sleeping in his car, his wife left him etc. The last episode I watched (last night at the time of writing) told the story of a violent robbery in a country home during which an elderly couple are attacked and killed.

Next morning I find out that my brother’s house in Ireland, also in the country, has been broken into. No one was hurt, thankfully, but the timing was enough to shoot serious shivers up and down my spine.

He had strolled nonchalantly into his house to make a cup of tea, as he does every afternoon at 3pm, in broad daylight, to find three men in balaclavas, ripping the place apart. Bravely he chased them out, avoiding a few swings of a large brush. A gold chain, wedding cufflinks, a pendant gifted to his wife by my mother, a signet ring, all gone. Treasured items. Irreplaceable.

He sent me photos – drawers emptied, their contents tossed in every direction; windows broken; bedrooms pulled apart. A hot mess.

It makes you think about what drives someone to destroy the peace and harmony of another person’s home, to grab as much as they can for themselves.

This is what Lloyd Jones is getting at in his new book, what he calls “a disgraceful moment in our history”, defined by injustice, crime and xenophobia. Bess Manson travelled to Jones’ Wairarapa home to find out more. Page 10.