Fifteen-year-old Ricky lives in Aspiring, a town that’s growing at an alarming rate. Ricky’s growing, too — 6’7”, and taller every day. But he’s stuck in a loop: student, uncommitted basketballer, and puzzled son, burdened by his family’s sadness. With sunlight, verve and humor, Damien Wilkins brings us a beguiling boy who’s trying to make sense of it all.
Amy is a store detective at Cutty’s, the oldest and grandest department store in the country. She’s good at her job. She can read people and catch them. But Cutty’s is closing down. Amy has a young baby, an ailing mother, and a large mortgage. She also has a past as an activist. This compelling novel opens in a police interview room, with Amy narrating the weeks leading up to the chaotic close of Cutty’s, a time when the store moves from permanent feature to ruin and when people under stress do strange things. An intense exploration of the moment when the solid ground of a life is taken away, this swiftly told novel shows again how unerringly and vividly Damien Wilkins traces the stress fractures of contemporary living.
It’s Wellington, now. Acoustic Engineer Michael Stirling’s old life is gone. He’s on the dating scene, learning te reo Maori, living in an upmarket apartment complex, and visiting his father who has dementia. Wearing his online dating disguise, Michael meets Chrissie, the widowed mother of a young son. Then his beloved adult daughter arrives from Auckland with a new attachment, an artist whose project will push them all towards key moments of risk and revelation.
Dad Art is a vibrant, funny new work from the leading chronicler of contemporary life in Aotearoa. Told with great verve, this novel is about the capacity for surprise and renewal.
Jamie is a forty-one-year-old drug addict. His kidneys, master chemists of the body, have just produced a stone. He's in terrible pain and he needs surgery. Great news. However, the hospital stay doesn't quite work out and Jamie, knowing it's the lowest thing he's ever done, decides he must go somewhere he hasn't been in years—home; to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely this pair, with their access to pharmaceuticals, and their blood ties, will help him. And if all else fails, there is Jamie's insomniac mother, who has various prescriptions running around inside her cupboards.
An old hand at deception, the character of Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other end is a pair of similarly desperate eighteen-year-olds: Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to get on the methadone programme and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory. As some kind of solution, Sally and Shane embark on a blackmail plot which eventually draws in many of the other characters and which builds to an explosive end.
Chemistry is a story about bad choices and those who suffer the consequences. It is also a story about the resourcefulness of the sufferers, and about those who come through. Dark and funny and frightening, it is a novel fastened hard to the recognizable details of small-town New Zealand life, which moves with great force to its unexpected and eloquent conclusion. It is Damien Wilkins''s finest novel yet.
Back in school they enjoyed vodka tonics for lunch at Gary's mum's place until Steve threw up in a beaker at science class. These days, stretching the tenuous ties of the decades, Gary, Steve, Dave and Tim meet once a month to play tennis which serves as a foreplay to drinking. But the things that brought the men together now seem less potent than what is driving them apart. Damien Wilkins' first play.
Cast: Nick Dunbar, Robbie Hunt, Gavin Rutherford, and Simon Vincent
Director: Murray Lynch
