F Victoria University Press: 2016 Catalogue DAD ART I C 2016 Fiction 3 T Poetry 9 I Non-fiction 19 Damien Wilkins O N 2015 Fiction 27 Poetry 32 March 2016 ISBN: 9781776560561 2016 Non-fiction 35 Paperback 138 x 210 mm; 232 pp. RRP: $30 How to order: Fiction Victoria University Press books are distributed by Upstart Distribution, represented by Archetype Book Agents, and are available from all good booksellers. It’s Wellington, now. Acoustic Engineer Michael Upstart Distribution Archetype Book Agents Stirling’s old life is gone. He’s on the dating scene, PO Box 302-749 17 Cascade Ave learning te reo Māori, living in an upmarket North Harbour Waiatarua apartment complex, and visiting his father who Auckland 0751 Auckland 0604 has dementia. Wearing his online dating disguise, New Zealand Ph +64 9 814 9455, Fax +64 9 814 9453 Michael meets Chrissie, the widowed mother of Ph +64 9 280 3199, Fax +64 9 281 3090 [email protected] a young son. Then his beloved adult daughter [email protected] arrives from Auckland with a new attachment, an artist whose project will push them all towards key Other enquiries: moments of risk and revelation. Victoria University Press Dad Art is a vibrant, funny new work from the PO Box 600 leading chronicler of contemporary life in Aotearoa. Wellington Told with great verve, this novel is about the capacity +64 4 463 6580 for surprise and renewal. [email protected] ‘It adds to the list of likeable, though not quite Publisher: Fergus Barrowman Publicist: Kirsten McDougall admirable characters with which Wilkins has charmed Editor: Ashleigh Young Administrator: Craig Gamble readers for two decades: competent, scrupulous about Editing and Production: Kyleigh Hodgson Editorial Intern: Holly Hunter their social and familial duties, but knocked off their perch into the uneasy condition of emotional outsiders.’ Cover design by Keely O’Shannessy. —John Sinclair, Metro Any resale prices or margins or conditions for sale set out or indicated herein are suggestions only. Other prices may be charged, and other conditions of sale may be imposed in relation to the goods to which the prices of margins or conditions of sale relate, without the risk of the issuer of this notice or the supplier of the goods applying sanctions of any kind. All recommended retail prices include GST. The publication dates listed in this catalogue are subject to change, and titles were necessarily limited due to space constraints. A full catalogue and backlist can be found on our website, vup.victoria.ac.nz. 3 F F I MYSTERIOUS MYSTERIES DELETED SCENES FOR LOVERS I C C T OF THE ARO VALLEY T I I O Danyl McLauchlan Tracey Slaughter O N N June 2016 May 2016 2016 ISBN: 9781776560479 ISBN: 9781776560585 2016 Paperback Paperback 138 x 210 mm; 400 pp. 138 x 210 mm; 224 pp. RRP: $30 RRP: $30 Fiction Fiction A returning hero. ‘The knowledge of everyone they’re about to hurt is A desolate valley. not an easy element to breathe in. They’re the lovers. A missing mathematician. You can blame them now, if you want to. That’s your A glamorous and beguiling council bureaucrat with choice: this is the director’s cut.’ a hidden past. Seventeen powerful stories of contemporary New A cryptic map leading to an impossible labyrinth. Zealand life from a writer whose penetrating gaze An ancient conspiracy; an ancient evil. reveals the full experience of her characters’ lives— A housing development without proper planning tragic, comic, rich. permission. All leading to the most mysterious mystery of all. Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley is a dark and forbidding new comic farce by the author of Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley. ‘Aro Comic Noir just may become a literary cult of its own.’ —David Hill, NZ Herald ‘Tracey Slaughter brings a breathtaking lyricism to the short story; the language is at once baroque and raw, pulsing with risk and edgy desire. These exquisite pieces don’t just get under the skin; they smash and kick at the heart.’ —Catherine Chidgey 4 5 F I THE WISH CHILD An excerpt from THE WISH CHILD C T I O Catherine Chidgey N Mama had been saving sugar and flour for weeks, putting it Mama was wrong. Erich wept for the fish, lying on the sofa and November 2016 aside into special tins that Erich was not allowed to touch. burying his face in the tasselled green cushions where everything 2016 ISBN: 978177650622 Paperback It was their duty, she said, to have a normal Christmas, was soft and cool and dark, and he could not hear Mama saying 138 x 210 mm; 320 pp. even without Papa, even though when the wind blew in the that German boys should be brave; that German boys should RRP: $30 right direction they could smell the smoke from the bombs know some things had to die. He could feel his grandmother Fiction that had fallen on Leipzig. The house filled with the aroma stroking his back, and where she stroked, fins appeared, and of hazelnuts and cinnamon, cloves and almonds, and Mama he swam into the soft darkness, the tasselled weeds parting This astonishing new novel from the bestselling author tucked her hair under her headscarf and hurried about the for a moment to let him through, then closing behind him. of In a Fishbone Church will be one of the literary kitchen as if there was an emergency, kneading sweet brown That night at dinner Mama lit the candles and sat in Papa’s events of 2016. The story of two German families dough and cutting it into fir trees and stars, pinching pieces chair. She placed the fish at the centre of the table, its fins and caught up in the Second World War, The Wish Child of sugary white mixture into crescent moons. The shapes were tail as brittle as sycamore wings. Erich could see the slit along its is both a love letter of sorts to Berlin, and a terrifying the shapes of a still night in the forest, and Erich wished he belly, and the filling of onions and parsley leaking onto the dish portrayal of the way ordinary Germans were drawn could slip through his bedroom window when Mama was that had belonged to Mama’s mama, who was dead. The little into the Nazi dream. asleep and go to the woods beyond the farm and stand there in wooden angels hung on the tree; angels in sleighs, angels playing the fragrant dark, looking up through the black branches—but trumpets, angels doing things that people do, and this was not Catherine’s first novel, In a Fishbone Church, was a the forest was not safe any more. It hid runaways and traitors, at all strange, because angels were dead people, after all, and New Zealand bestseller and won the Hubert Church all manner of enemies, bad shadows waiting in every hollow. why should they not remember how to play trumpets and ride Award for Best First Book of Fiction in the Montana In the tub the carp was growing. When they needed to in sleighs? Erich wanted to ask Oma if angels had memories but NZ Book Awards, the South East Asia and Pacific bathe Erich caught it in a bucket and set it aside and it Mama was peeling back the skin and cutting up the fish, cutting Region Prize in the Commonwealth Writers Prize for waited, curled like a question mark, until he poured it back. a slice for Oma and for Tante Uschi and for Erich and for Best First Novel, a Betty Trask prize for a first book At night he could hear it splashing, leaping from the water, herself, and telling him to say grace. He did not want to thank (UK) and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her and each morning he had to dry the bathroom floor so that God or anybody else for the thing that lay before him, and so he second novel, Golden Deeds, was runner-up for the nobody would slip and break their neck. The fish was calm said the words with his eyes open and his head unbowed, and Deutz Medal for Fiction and was published under the then, barely moving, but it came to him when he beckoned when he had finished Mama said, Amen, just as she did when title The Strength of the Sun by Henry Holt in the US, it, nudging at his fingers as they fluttered beneath the water. she finished her prayers to the head, and then she began to eat, where it was a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the And in the mornings, too, Erich saw Mama saying her plucking the fine bones from the flesh so that she would not Year’. prayers to the bronze head with the blank eyes. It glinted choke. Erich pushed his fork into a piece of the carp and raised just as the carp glinted, although it was not a living thing; it to his mouth, and his mother smiled and the candle-flames no, it was not alive, not alive, but its eyes watched without shook and the shadows climbed the walls and the snow fell, iris or pupil, and you could not tell where they were looking. and the hollow head watched like a father, and Erich knew then On Christmas Eve Mama killed the carp. She took a that the hand holding the fork was not his own, and nor was hammer, the hammer Papa used for fixing things, and she the mouth receiving the food; it was a different boy who placed killed it, and then she cut it open, and it was not clean on the warm morsel on his tongue, a different boy who chewed the inside, even though it had been in the bath for days, and and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, and asked for more.