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New work from the master of the short story and author of the story 'Coming Home in the Dark' made into a major feature film. 'Whenever I think of coming to punish my father, it's always in a strong wind, and that's blowing now as I drive up the long, unsealed track to the house and sheds.' So begins one of Owen Marshall's superbly subversive stories. He offers up a wide range of subjects, from untimely deaths to unusual discoveries made about friends or neighbours, from burnishing an overseas trip to a tale about saving a business venture- 'Just in time,' said Paddy. 'I thought I was going to have to resort to giving blow jobs in the office.' It wasn't quite as Jane A would have expressed relief, perhaps, but sincere in its own way . . . With over ten years since his last collection of new stories, Marshall explores his fellow New Zealanders, bringing his wisdom and wry eye to vivid, insightful scenes- 'Places bring back people, people bring back places, and both conjure the cinema of your past.'
Author: Owen Marshall
ISBN: 9780143776536
Publisher: Random House New Zealand Ltd
Published: 02/08/2022
Format: Paperback / softback
About the Author
Owen Marshall, described by Vincent O'Sullivan as 'New Zealand's best prose writer', is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet and anthologist, who has written or edited more than 30 books, including the bestselling novel The Larnachs. Numerous awards for his fiction include the New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters, fellowships at Otago and Canterbury universities, and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France. In 2000 he became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to literature; in 2012 was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM); and in 2013 he received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction. In 2000 his novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction. Many of his other books have been shortlisted for major awards, and his work has been extensively anthologised. In addition, in 2003 he was the inaugural recipient of the Creative New Zealand Writers' Fellowship, and was the 2009/10 Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellow. In 2006 he was invited by the French Centre National du Livre to participate in their Les Belles Etranges festival and subsequent tour, anthology and documentary. He was the President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors 2007-08 and delivered the 2010 Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture. He was a school teacher for many years, having graduated with an MA (Hons) from the University of Canterbury, which in 2002 awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, and in 2005 appointed him an adjunct professor. See more at www.owenmarshall.net.nz. Many leading contemporary writers have counted themselves amongst his admirers, including Janet Frame and Fiona Kidman, who wrote of his work, 'I find myself exclaiming over and again with delight at the precision, the beauty, the near perfection of his writing.' Writer, historian and literary biographer Michael King wrote of Marshall, 'Quite simply the most able and the most successful exponent of the short story currently writing in New Zealand.' In World Literature Today, Carolyn Bliss described Marshall as a writer who 'speaks with equal intensity to the unbearable loveliness and malevolence of life'. Writer and academic Vincent O'Sullivan has claimed 'nobody tells our New Zealand stories better'.