When it comes to the quality of the writing, are we anywhere near in the same league? We're definitely in the same ballpark, I would say.

Yeah, I would say that Sunrise is up with Ian Epril's early writing, definitely.

It has that stripped back nature, that idea that there's lots of very solid descriptions of very solid things that take you there.

So the plot's about this woman called Nina, and she's actually fallen out of a Cessna aeroplane into a lake, believe it or not.

It's quite a dramatic, almost melodramatic start, but the story holds it up.

And she's jumped or been pushed from what cut shore by her boyfriend, Ben, who's in the plane with her.

And there's some sense that the relationship with Ben might be quite as nice as it seems now.

Now, in a similar vein, how much and how different is Awake, Awake by Fiona

Phil Vine, good morning.

Kia ora, Catherine.

Love that track.

What do we have here, Phil?

Yeah.

So I reckon any book which professes to tell you the future must be read with a bucket of salt.

Elemental is such a book.

It seeks to combine the science of climate change with the vagaries of geopolitics and make some educated guesses about how things are going to roll.

What about you? Where did you start?

Well, I got this tip, classic news tip, right? From someone who I guess you'd describe as being on the kind of fringy edge of a, of an alternative community, saying that there was this small group of people who had escaped, that was the word used, from this high-demand cultic group based in an old hunting lodge, like way up into the remote parts of Te Waipounamu, the South Island.

So I heard stories of supernatural powers being offered at this place, this, this wellness center, um, people being promised they could fly, people thinking that a guru there who, um, they were all based around could cure them without medicine.

And I guess the thing that galvanized it for me was I got shown this series of photographs of a, of a man in his 30s.

This guy started off with a, kind of a, a small mole under his eye, and there were these series of pictures taken over weeks and months where this, this mole got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was a growth which obscured his eye.

And so these were taken by the members of the cult to show that their guru, the grandmaster, would be able to cure cancer.

Um, by the time I saw these photos, he had died by, after receiving treatment, life force energy treatment from the guru Ai Ping Wong.

She was just 17 years old when she met him, and I just don't know how much of a, a chance you stand, um-Against someone like Simon who is so spiritually dominant