Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  The story of the growing relationship between Conny and William’s younger son, Dougie, lies at the heart of Owen Marshall’s subtle and compelling new novel. The socially restrictive world of late nineteenth-century Dunedin and Wellington springs vividly to life as Marshall traces the deepening love between stepmother and stepson, and the slow disintegration of the domineering yet vulnerable figure of Larnach himself.

  Can love ever really be its own world, free of morality and judgement and scandal? Moving, thought-provoking and superbly written, The Larnachs is a memorable piece of fiction from one of our wisest authors.

  ‘[The Larnachs is] a thoughtful, tender love story with … an awful lot of lovely, restrained writing by Marshall.’

  — Kelly Ana Morey, The New Zealand Herald

  ‘The Larnachs is an interesting development for Marshall. For many years pigeon-holed as a writer of realist fiction from a masculine perspective, he has proved himself far more than a one-trick pony. He has published two volumes of poetry and The Larnachs is his fourth novel. Half of it is written from a woman’s point of view.’

  — John McCrystal, New Zealand Listener

  Rich and subtle, this is a compelling novel from one of New Zealand’s finest writers. It is a moving study of love and disappointment, of the harm we do to each other, knowingly and unknowingly, of the power and significance of landscape in our lives.

  A graveyard is all that’s left of the remote Central Otago settlement of Drybread, where miners, often hungry and disappointed, once searched for gold. It is to an old cottage nearby that Penny Maine-King flees with her young son, defying a Californian court order awarding custody of the child to her estranged husband. And seeking her in this austere, burnt country is journalist Theo Esler. He is after a story, but he discovers something far more personal and significant.

  ‘Drybread’s success lies in Marshall’s dextrous examination of the ambiguities of relationships — between parents and children, spouses, work colleagues and lovers — and how the needs of those on the inside don’t often coincide.’

  — Kevin Rabalais, New Zealand Listener

  A new and generous selection from New Zealand’s foremost writer of short stories. Peter Simpson in reviewing Owen Marshall’s stories in the New Zealand Listener wrote: ‘Marshall is held in uncommon affection by New Zealand readers — generally we admire and respect rather than love our writers.’ This love is perhaps evoked not just by the superb quality of Marshall’s writing but because his stories so precisely capture his fellow New Zealanders and their country. From the provinces to the cities, the remote landscapes to journeying overseas, Marshall’s stories show a deep understanding of who and where we are. Sometimes he skewers the locals with sharp and sly comedy, in other stories there’s an elegiac sadness or a grim reality, but always an insightful exploration of human emotions.

  From the substantial body of work created over the last thirty years, critic, writer and academic Vincent O’Sullivan has selected sixty stories that give a wide representation of Marshall’s range. Marshall once wrote that short stories should aspire to a combination of ‘intransigence and poetry’, both of which are evident in this fine selection.

  What happens when an ordinary man becomes a messiah? A witty, prescient and eloquent satire by one of New Zealand’s finest writers.

  Far into the twenty-first century, Albous Slaven’s life is spectacularly and irrevocably altered after he hangs for an instant from a power line. While recuperating, he senses a new-found gift; the gift of oratory.

  Driven to hold rallies throughout New Zealand, Slaven astounds and alarms the ruling politicians. He, too, is astounded and often bemused by the response of the tens of thousands who flock to hear him. But what is his message? Is he a messiah, a political saviour, or an idealist who conjures up forces he can neither understand nor control?

  ‘[A Many Coated Man] really is a great novel and may well be seen as a landmark in our national literature.’

  — Ian Dixon, The Press

  ‘In these richly lyrical passages [in A Many Coated Man], Marshall is at his most characteristic and his most brilliant.’

  — Elizabeth Caffin, Quote/Unquote

  ‘[A Many Coated Man] is the work of a master craftsman.’

  — W.J. McEldowney, Otago Daily Times

  ‘A Many Coated Man is a dark, disconcerting novel, a visionary book well worth the wait.’

  — Graeme Lay, North & South

  ‘[A Many Coated Man is] delightfully sardonic, philosophically mischievous.’

  — Vincent O’Sullivan

  This novel won the Montana NZ Book Awards Deutz Medal.

  With the advent of the new millennium comes a new disease — Harlequin Rex — and a variety of reactions to it. The men and women in this intriguing novel find themselves caught up in a terrifying novelty, and all must cope as best they can. Their response is influenced as much by the past as by present events, however, those formative things that lie far back in us all: guilt, loyalty, compromise and love — especially love.

  ‘Redemptive this isn’t; but nonetheless it expresses a vision of life which much of the most significant writing of the century to which Marshall is bidding farewell has given expression during its course, a kind of stoical pessimism in which humanity is seen as something that endures rather than something that prevails. By bringing its peculiar plague from the world to New Zealand, by playing out the end of the century at our end of the world, Harlequin Rex enlarges the boundaries of our fiction towards the dimensions of those works.’

  — Patrick Evans

  Shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Awards, these twenty-five stories are at once arresting, moving, funny and full of insight into the human condition.

  Being a celebrity impersonator, says Aussie Elton John, is like living your life as a moon. ‘We give up our identity and become just a reflection of another personality, like the moon having no fire of its own and being just a pale reflection of the sun when it’s not there.’

  This collection of stories from master short-fiction writer Owen Marshall is rich with people exploring their identities and how they are affected by others. There is Patrick, whose life is radically altered by a random encounter with a killer; widowed Margaret, who faces a new kind of existence alone; David, who experiences the ‘spontaneous and passing friendship of strangers’; Ian, whose wife’s demands for a better lifestyle lead him to a new career in telephone sex. Set in both Europe and the Antipodes, these stories will be savoured long after reading.

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