Singularity
Singularity further develops the structure Grimshaw 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. Each story is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind the five principal characters together.
Roza Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the Prime Minister’s wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm, but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives.
Sharp, moving, brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at once a meditation on power and politics, and an intensely humane look at the choices people make as they struggle, against the odds, to maintain love and integrity in their lives.
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 Ford 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 Simon’s secret past love affair, while Roza tells 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.
A stand-alone novel that is also a sequel to The Night Book and a continuation of the Simon Lampton story first touched on in Opportunity and Singularity.
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, which have been published in New Zealand, the UK and Canada. 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 awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction, along with the Montana Medal for Book of the Year. She was also the Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel The Night Book was a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She lives in Auckland.
Praise for Starlight Peninsula
‘The other thrill of Grimshaw’s books, and Starlight Peninsula in particular, is the craft of their storytelling. Watching events unfold in Starlight Peninsula, from both inside and outside Eloise’s understanding, is an extremely exciting experience … some of the most thrilling and nail-biting reading I’ve done.’ — Metro
‘Conspiracy, duplicity, notoriety, ambiguity, agony, loss, romance and catharsis: Starlight Peninsula charts all the thematic complexities of its predecessors, while offering the kind of astute political and psychological mystery which can be read as a standalone.’ — The Dominion Post Weekend
‘It’s so, so clever … the characters are just brilliant … the peninsula is a fabulous backdrop … I just loved it … This is a very, very good book.’ — RNZ National
‘Charlotte Grimshaw’s mind is a delightful thing. Her ability to seamlessly develop minor characters from prior novels and re-imagine real-life events is brilliantly evident … a well-crafted, intriguing story with expertly developed characters, beautifully described landmarks and cultural references Kiwi readers will easily recognise.’ — The Australian Women’s Weekly
‘I would read and treasure this book just for the portrait of Demelza … It’s a knowing book alert to all evidence of human follies and the obfuscations people use to get through life.’ — North & South
‘A clever, witty and complex book.’ — The Northern Advocate
‘… a terrific, tense story in a strikingly local landscape.’ — NZ Books
Praise for Soon
‘An efficient, coolly poetic tale of Auckland’s glitterati … darkly comic … paced like a classy thriller, it slips down as easily as the Hallwrights’ dirty gin cocktails.’ — The List, UK
‘A tightly plotted, incisive depiction of the corrosive effects of power.’ — Publishers Weekly, US
‘One of the ten best reads for summer.’ — Red, UK
‘Opening the pages of Charlotte Grimshaw’s new novel Soon is akin to tilting the blinds in a dim room; the razor-sharp precision of her words floods your mind with crisp, searing light, such is the vivid clarity of her prose … Soon is clever and uncomfortable at the same time.’ — One News, TVNZ
‘Charlotte Grimshaw’s star has never glowed brighter; ingenious, lively, provocative.’ — Landfall
‘The hallmark of Grimshaw’s work is the very high quality of her prose. She creates atmosphere extremely well, the effect of keeping a very tight focus on the moment and narrating in short sinewy sentences with scarcely a word out of place.’ — New Zealand Books
‘Soon is a sly, masterly novel.’ — Literary Review, UK
‘Full of delicious political and social satire.’ — Daily Mail, UK
‘A truly riveting novel.’ — The Globe and Mail, Canada
‘A stunning achievement.’ — The Vancouver Sun
Praise for The Night Book
‘Charlotte Grimshaw is writing some of the smartest fiction around.’ — Philip Matthews, Dominion Post
‘This is a beautifully written novel — suspenseful, topical and a wonderful study of human relationships.’ — Kerre Woodham, Sunday Star-Times
‘I rate Charlotte Grimshaw as the most important, significant and arrestingly talented of our middle year writers. I finished The Night Book wit
h regret and am now delighted that she is continuing some of its storylines.’ — Christine Cole Catley
‘A brilliant take on society. The Night Book’s got so much going for it; narrative drive, pace, suspense and beautifully controlled seamless writing … Quite brilliant.’ — Nelson Mail
‘This penetrating novel treads perfectly the divide between fact and fiction.’ — Sunday Star-Times
‘A swiftly-paced, complex novel … We can look forward to seeing where Grimshaw goes from here.’ — Otago Daily Times
Praise for Singularity
‘Charlotte Grimshaw is the most interesting young writer of fiction in New Zealand today.’ — The Dominion Post
‘She is a master with mystery, very contemporary and astute … Her language is relaxed, spare and perfect.’ — Jane Campion in The Guardian, UK
‘Grimshaw’s vivid descriptions … are a joy.’ — The Times Literary Supplement, UK
‘… one of the most accomplished and gripping short story collections in some time … Along with that comes Grimshaw’s facility for creating believable, multi-layered characters who spring fully formed from the page.’ — The Glasgow Herald
‘Stylistically, Singularity is stunning. Grimshaw’s prose is crisp, elegant and richly descriptive … Most importantly, whether taken together, or in single serves, these stories are page-turning reads.’ —The New Zealand Herald
‘Charlotte Grimshaw is a stunning writer … Throughout, Grimshaw’s control of language is exquisite and almost painfully acute …’ — New Zealand Listener
‘Singularity has many of the qualities that made Opportunity so successful: the precise, spare yet evocative language; the strong sense of place and the sensuously exact descriptions; the sharp, unsparing eye for the details of speech and behaviour that reveal character, both the social surface persona and the often less presentable and more vulnerable inner self. But the new book is more ambitious … This is a book to be read and reread both for its local felicities and for its larger resonances.’ — Otago Daily Times
‘… it delivers images, characters and scenes that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.’ — Sunday Star-Times
‘What a terrific writer Charlotte Grimshaw is. If you ever doubted that, her latest book will dispel such a notion … in a word: Brilliant.’ — North & South
‘It’s official. Auckland’s Charlotte Grimshaw is one of the best short-story writers in the world.’ — The Weekend Press
‘Charlotte Grimshaw has to be one of the most interesting New Zealand authors today … it is a grimly fascinating book.’ — Next
Praise for Opportunity
‘One of the most gripping books of short stories I’ve ever read … Grimshaw’s imagination and vision is astonishing. Her prose is spare and amazingly expressive. Opportunity is a book to read compulsively and re-read for its subtlety, penetration and sheer brilliance.’ — Writers’ Radio, Radio Adelaide
‘A darkly glittering achievement.’ — Dominion Post
‘A writer with impressive command of style and subject … It’s riddling and rewarding. Appreciate its skill. Acknowledge its depth.’ — The New Zealand Herald
‘This is the most enjoyable New Zealand collection of short stories I have read since Emily Perkins’s Not Her Real Name.’ — The Press
‘Opportunity is beautifully crafted, colourful and hard to keep to yourself. A sense of detail, vividly narrated, gives the whole book a richness that belies its simplicity of structure … Never heavy, always one step ahead of the reader in terms of black humour and unexpected outcome, Opportunity deserves to be read aloud.’ —Capital Times
‘Charlotte Grimshaw just keeps getting better and better.’ — Next
VINTAGE
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Vintage is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2018
Text © Charlotte Grimshaw, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Kate Barraclough © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Text design by Cat Taylor © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Author photograph © Jane Ussher
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN: 978-0-14-377183-8
THE BEGINNING
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