Vividwater
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In a future world, supplies of drinkable water are depleted, except for a few hydrospheres. A huge gulf grows between the water-rich few with watercards and water-poor scavvos.
Alex is a mnemopath, a memory machine for a senior manager in water export trading, feeding facts into her boss's earpiece and eavesdropping. Her job isn't noble, but she needed the water allowance.
When an old boyfriend, Lawrence, returns, working for the main Chinese water company, Alex dreams of escape. But Lawrence exposes his company's marketing fraud and is disappeared back to China.
Alex is ousted from her company, on the grounds of fraternising with the company Lawrence worked for. Her watercard turned off, Alex finds a way to fight back. Her bosses underestimate her, but as a human memory machine, she knows enough to blackmail them.
Now she just has to get to China to find Lawrence.
Author: Jacqueline Owens
ISBN: 9780473730277
Publisher: Four Elements Press
Published: 02/04/2025
Format: Paperback / softback
About the Author
Jacqueline Owens lives in Wellington. Vividwater was longlisted for Grindstone Literary International Novel Prize, and shortlisted twice in the Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize. It is the first in a three-part series.
Excerpts and short stories from other manuscripts have been published in online journals. A screenplay, The Floating World, won the New Zealand Writers Guild (NZWG) Best Unproduced Screenplay Competition and
another, Three Gardens, was a quarterfinalist in the Nicholl and Blue Cat competitions. A young adult novel, Bluest Moon, was published by New Women's Press, in the 90s.
Outside writing, she has had mnemopath-like jobs in government and made the most of degrees in Classics and Political Science, as a grand-finalist on Mastermind New Zealand, with subjects The Chronicles of Narnia and Classical Greek Mythology. While doing a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Screen and Television, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, she was a university teaching assistant and assessed screenplays for production companies.