Overview

'Big themes are treated delicately - mortality and memory, grief and self-discovery' - Weekend Herald Beautifully written, brilliantly observed and ultimately optimistic, this novel by one of New Zealand's finest writers powerfully captures those times when death puts life on hold. Sheff is disillusioned with journalism and, with plans to travel overseas, chucks in his job. But first he goes south to Alexandra, where his father is dying. He becomes caught up with his family in the agonising inertia of waiting for approaching death. Slowly he comes to terms with suppressed issues of loss, love, resentment and commitment, and acknowledges he must reach out for new relationships. Sheff's gradual transformation - sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes disconcerting - is handled with insight and subtlety and is totally convincing.

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9781775535829

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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'.

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