If 'Mother won't come to us', New Zealanders must go to 'Mother' ...In alien yet strangely familiar territory, a place her ancestors 'got off', what must an expat in England do to survive? Score herself a bedsit, work in a pub, hunt up an office job - and keep an eye out ...Set on the cusp of the 1970s-1980s, Janet Charman's compelling new book centres on the disorienting experiences of a young woman newly arrived in London - squalid flats, temp work, ancestral visits and trips to the Continent. Charman has a laser-sharp eye for unsettling social cues, her outsider's vision of the city peristently challenged by encounters with an array of its remarkable inhabitants - distant relatives who stayed 'at home', welfare 'clients' and their social workers, fellow antipodean travellers - contacts inescapably marked by the claims and memories of that 'other' white coast: Aotearoa. In gritty lyric and biting word play, Charman's account of the OE experience reveals a passage hedged with earnest expectation and ripe with the black comedy of disillusion. This multi-voiced narrative sets out with telling details, a record of the secular pilgrimage of a single traveller from all the generations of Kiwis to alight 'at the white coast'.