Just sometimes, in the annual whirl at this time of year of big-name authors with new novels for the yuletide season, along comes a slender jewel of a book like Maurice Gee's Access Road.

Gee, a giant of New Zealand letters with more than 40 books to his credit, is all but unknown in this country (compare the similar scenario of Lloyd Jones until Mister Pip came along), but I suspect that is all about to change with this exquisite novel. It is the story of the Beach family – in particular, the siblings Lionel, Roly and Rowan – as narrated by the latter to her journal amidst the everyday goings-on of life in retirement. As her brothers have moved back to the family home, her visits there bring memories pouring back – of youthful escapades, adolescent fumblings, and those moments in life that seemed to shape their destinies forever.

Rowan's husband, for instance, was on the verge of becoming an All Black until a sports mishap up-ended that dream and a more prosaic existence began. Lionel and Roly, too, seem to have lived under a shadow – but does the key to that lie in their sinister childhood friend Clyde Buckley? What we have here, it seems to me, is almost an Antipodean ‘speak memory’ – the sights, smells and characters of the small town of Loomis, the pains and secrets of families, and the allure and ache of memory recalled.

A truly magical book!