The latest enthralling novel from the author of The Night Book and Soon.
Eloise Hay lives on the Starlight Peninsula. Every weekday she travels into the city to work at Q TV Studio, assisting with the production of a current affairs show. One night she receives a phone call that will change her life forever.
Thrown into the turmoil of a sudden marriage break-up, Eloise begins to perceive that a layer of the world has been hidden from her. Seeking answers, she revisits a traumatic episode from her past, and in doing so encounters an odd-eyed policewoman, a charismatic obstetrician, a German psychotherapist, and a flamboyant internet pirate wanted by the United States Government. Each of these characters will reveal something about the life of Eloise Hay, answering questions that she hasn't, until now, had the courage to ask.
Tracing the lines that run through our society, from the interior life of one lonely young woman to the top tier of influence in the country, Charlotte Grimshaw's powerful novel demonstrates how little separates us and how close we really are: rich and poor, famous and hidden, virtuous and criminal.
Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels and outstanding collections of linked stories. As a reviewer in The New Zealand Listener noted: ‘A swarming energy pervades every page she writes . . . her descriptive writing has always been of the highest order. Most of it would work just as well as poetry.' She has been a double finalist and prize winner in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, and in 2006 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. In 2007 she won a Book Council Six Pack prize. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and in 2008 Opportunity won New Zealand's premier Montana Award for Fiction or Poetry. She was also the 2008 Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was short-listed for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Grimshaw's fourth novel, The Night Book was shortlisted for the 2011 NZ Post Award. She writes a monthly column in Metro magazine, for which she won a 2009 Qantas Media Award.