Singularity

A compelling and powerful new collection of stories from one of New Zealand's most gifted writers

Reprising characters familiar from her award-winning short-story collection, Opportunity, Charlotte Grimshaw once more trains her eye on the suburban streets of Auckland and the beaches of the west coast of New Zealand... Highly descriptive... Elemental landscapes provide the backdrop to some highly evolved emotional states.

Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. In 2000 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature. She has been a double finalist and prizewinner in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, and in 2006 she won the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award. In 2007 she won a place in the Book Council's Six Pack prize. Her story collection Opportunity won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the Montana medal. She lives in Auckland.

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Medal for Fiction. She has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. 
 
Singularity, her powerful new collection, further develops the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added. The stories in Singularity cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each also contributes to a unifying narrative. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind the five principal characters together.

Charlotte Grimshaw

Full of delicious satire, Grimshaw is much lauded in New Zealand and should have entered the British consciousness long ago.

The unsettling juxtaposition of urbanity and blood-letting that characterises Grimshaw's other fiction keeps things edgy and jumpy here

Grimshaw cleverly depicts a series of power struggles as her characters seek to manipulate each other, forcing the reader to question their motives.

Opening the pages of Charlotte Grimshaw’s new novel Soon is akin to tilting the blinds in a dim room; the razor-like precision of her words flood your mind with crisp, searing light, such is the vivid clarity of her prose... It’s a wonderful novel which explores morality and the extent to which we are responsible for our own actions.

Smart political thriller… Spiked with satire… Sophisticated

During the long summer holiday, the Lampton and Hallwright families gather in a large beach house belonging to Prime Minister David Hallwright and his wife Roza. The weather is perfect and outwardly all is well, but the harmony is disturbed when Simon Lampton’s brother arrives for a visit. Ford casts a cold eye over the company, barely disguising his contempt for David Hallwright. To add to Simon’s discomfort a young man called Arthur Weeks makes contact, asking about his secret past affair, and Roza begins to tell her small son Johnnie a continuous story about a group of fantasy creatures – a story that contains uncomfortable parallels with their current lives. When Simon agrees to meet secretly with Arthur Weeks, the result will threaten the security of them all. 
 
Charlotte Grimshaw’s exhilaratingly gripping and clever narrative traces the lives of its beautiful people – ‘moral imbeciles’ in Ford’s words – as they jostle for position in their leader’s court. This humane and capacious novel, generous and faithful to its characters in ways that they are not to each other, articulates the ancient idea that to be moral is an act of consciousness, an effort of will.

Charlotte Grimshaw

Praise for Soon

A sly masterly novel

Full of delicious satire, Grimshaw is much lauded in New Zealand and should have entered the British consciousness long ago.

The unsettling juxtaposition of urbanity and blood-letting that characterises Grimshaw's other fiction keeps things edgy and jumpy here

A sly masterly novel

Full of delicious satire, Grimshaw is much lauded in New Zealand and should have entered the British consciousness long ago.

The unsettling juxtaposition of urbanity and blood-letting that characterises Grimshaw's other fiction keeps things edgy and jumpy here

A sly masterly novel

Full of delicious satire, Grimshaw is much lauded in New Zealand and should have entered the British consciousness long ago.

The unsettling juxtaposition of urbanity and blood-letting that characterises Grimshaw's other fiction keeps things edgy and jumpy here

Books by Charlotte Grimshaw

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