Comedian Chris Parker's new live show proved successful at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and he's ready to unleash it on the Kiwis.

Parker's touring Stop Being So Dramatic around the country and he's promised the show is his most personal yet.

He says he's expected a more reserved reception from Kiwi audiences - but he knows how to work with that.

"We still have this weird mentality sometimes, we're just like 'Oh, we're just little old Kiwis, no one knows about us and we're just a team of five million at the bottom of the world'...but our sensibility, what we can laugh at is just as advanced and as complicated and robust as any international audience."

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In a previous life, crime writer AA Dhand dealt with a lot, including overdoses, violence, and abuse, to name a few.

Amit worked on the frontline of the NHS crisis, running his 100 hour pharmacy in Bradford - surrounded by drugs, drug dealers and giving him insight into the lives of addicts and the dealers preying on the vulnerable.

He turned these experiences into a crime thriller, The Chemist.

"I kind of wrote it as Dexter meets Breaking Bad. The idea came to me when I was at my pharmacy and I'd seen a very unfortunate drug deal go wrong and somebody had died outside my pharmacy...the whole area was on lockdown with police and helicopters."

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A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan: In 1987, 10 year old Alix and her family are at the beach for the great New Zealand summer, but everything feels a little off - her teenage sister’s desperate to run with the in-crowd, her mother’s wildly distracted and her father is adrift. Alix befriends another holidaymaker, and they hunt for signs of a girl who went missing years ago, while a creepy neighbour watches everything they do. This hums with foreboding against the sun and sea. It’s magnetic.

A Dim Prognosis by Ivor Popovich - The author has been a doctor in New Zealand hospitals for the last ten years and describes a system which is itself on life support. It’s not just about the under funding and the bureaucracy of our health care, but he also covers the very toxic atmosphere that a lot of the young doctors work in, with senior doctors protecting their patch and demeaning or humiliating the newcomers; and the disparities between public and private healthcare and how so many of these senior doctors do extremely well from working across both, while patients and other health care workers suffer. It’s required reading for anyone with an interest in our hospitals and how they work - and how they don’t.

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