By Lily Duval
Canterbury University Press (2024)
As Lily Duval explains in her preface, Six-legged Ghosts had its inception in an art project for which she undertook to paint all of Aotearoa’s endangered and extinct species. A huge proportion of them, it turns out, are insects. But because they are little, or gross, or scary, they just don’t get the press dolphins and kākāpō do.
She set about understanding more about this “slow, silent dying”, and became an insect evangelist – read her book, and you’ll be one too. Richly illustrated with more than 100 of Lily’s paintings, Six-legged Ghosts covers everything from how language betrays our uneasy relationship with bugs (“horde”, “plague”, “swarm”), to the collecting / colonising of the insect world, to everything you need to know to come to love our resident weevils, moths and bees.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
