Poor People With Money

A darkly comic, gritty, punch-in-the-guts new novel that captures life on the poverty line, from the author of 1986, Iceland and I Thought We’d Be Famous.

Monday Wooldridge is a fighter with a face like a broken dinner plate.
Fifteen years ago, her kid brother Eddy disappeared and she’s been looking for him ever since.
When she’s not training, Monday works in a bar selling drinks to rich aholes and dreaming of escape.
Together with her flatmate JJ, Monday comes up with a scheme to make enough money to lift them both out of debt. But when things go awry, fleeing the city is their only option to escape the gangsters, the vampires and the ghosts of Monday’s past.
From the award-winning poet and playwright Dominic Hoey, Poor People with Money is a darkly comic, pacy, heart-twisting, punch-in-the-guts novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa New Zealand now.

‘Written with compassion and skill, Poor People with Money is a violent uprising of a novel. This is New Zealand.’

• Pip Adam

‘Fighting is the perfect metaphor for hard times. It teaches us to come to terms with our own morality, our capacity for good and for bad. Dom finds beauty in this struggle, in the space between hope and despair.’

• Matt Williams, Bones MMA

Author Biography

Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland, New Zealand.
His debut novel Iceland was a New Zealand bestseller, long-listed for the 2018 Ockham Book Award and his short story 1986 won the 2021 Sunday Star Times Short Story Award. His latest poetry collection I Thought We’d Be Famous was released in October 2019.
Dominic has written and performed two one-person hit shows about his bone disease and his inability to get arts funding.
In a former life, Dominic was an MC battle and slam-poetry champion.
Through his Learn To Write Good creative writing course, Dominic has taught hundreds of students around the world how to think dyslexic. He also works with young people through the Atawhai program, teaching art, yoga and meditation to help them with their mental health and self-esteem.
Currently he lives with a small, vicious dog and dreams of one day owning an animal rescue farm.