Charlotte Grimshaw

"Brave, explosive, and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir. 'It's material, make a story out of it,' was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her literary family. But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine the reality of that material. The more she delved into her memories, the more the real characters in her life seemed to object. So what was the truth of 'a whole life lived in fiction'? This is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead. It looks beyond the public face to the 'messy reality of family life - and much more'."--Back cover.

The Mirror Book

Clever and intriguing, this novel from an award-winning author explores the arid morality of the privileged. 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.

Soon

Opportunity

Mazarine

Sharp, pretty Stella lives high above Auckland harbour in uneasy luxury with Stuart, a powerful lawyer with a past who seems to specialise in violent death. Helping Stuart out with some of his cases, Stella finds herself inhabiting a sinister, twilit world populated by misfits and murderers. When they begin to work together on the case of quiet, gentle Carlos Lehman, an in-comer to a remote bush territory driven to murder, their already highly charged erotic relationship enters a new and dangerous phase. Richly sensuous, crackling with tension and black humour, yet at the same time moving and humane, PROVOCATION is a terrifying analysis of obsessive love and a thriller of extraordinary power and intelligence.

Provocation

The author's storytelling in these astute short stories is about generosity and opportunism and above all it is a celebration of the subtleties of human impulses.

'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous, to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' 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, sending them into a dangerous re-evaluation of the past and of the uncertain future before them. Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. 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.

The Night Book

From award-winning author Charlotte Grimshaw, this is a beautifully evocative, sensual portrayal of a woman's search for freedom and love. When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past. What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine? Following the narrative thread left by her daughter, she travels through cities touched by terrorism and surveillance, where ways of relating are subtly changed, and a startling new fiction seems to be constructing itself.

Award-winning Charlotte Grimshaw's remarkable collection of intertwined short stories. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story in this book is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind five principal characters together. The stories 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 in Australia to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each contributes to a unifying narrative, which also links back to her previous work Opportunity and forward to her subsequent works, The Night Book and Soon. Both Singularity and Opportunity were shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Prize, and the latter won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award.

Singularity

Amongst Auckland's freightyards, where rusting ferries loom over squalid nightclubs and all kinds of human detritus finish up, runs Quay Street, populated by drunks, junkies, psychos and derelicts. For Maria Wallis and Marcus Klein, she a promising young lawyer looking for kicks, he a budding novelist in search of inspiration, and each struggling to escape the humid embrace of a childhood spent suffocating in the suburbs, this is the place where you go to look for real life. But when Marcus wakes up in a gutted bedsit with third-degree burns and only the most tantalisingly vague memory of how he got there, and Maria finds herself oscillating between a sexually ambiguous kleptomaniac and a twenty-stone Maori bouncer with a taste for slasher videos, it seems clear that real life may be dirtier and more dangerous than they can handle. Edgy, intense, breathtakingly original and irresistibly deadpan, GUILT evokes a startlingly sinister, erotic underworld, in which a mesmerising drama of sexual obsession is played out to its extraordinary conclusion.

Guilt

Intricately plotted, this novel explores different kinds of fictions, infidelity and dangerous freedoms. Anna Devine, a young New Zealand painter living in London, has two chance encounters that set her on a search for answers. Can she really 'see' her new city properly? Can she reconcile family life and art? Her search leads her into past mysteries of her troubled family and her brother's death, and towards future complexities: infidelity, dangerous freedoms, and a whole new eye on her foreign city. In Auckland, in another time, Justine Devantier is reading a novel in order to find out about its author - and possibly about herself. And in a fictional city a man looks for a woman he knew long ago. At the core of this intricate plot is British novelist Richard Black, who may hold the strands that bind all the protagonists together. Grimshaw's brilliantly drawn characters walk through her foreign cities in different guises. She gives us a 'true' story, a fiction, a love story, a story of family connections lost and found, and a dazzling ride through the creative process - its practitioners, its casualties.

Foreign City

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. Longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Book Awards: ‘A masterclass in how to write a potentially unreliable and disconcerting central character . . . An exquisitely calibrated examination of truth and consequence, and a superb crime story.'

Starlight Peninsula

Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. 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. 'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous, to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' 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.

Now combined into a major TV drama, these two connected novels by award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw take an unflinching look at politics and power, contemporary New Zealand society and the arid morality of the privileged. In The Night Book, doctor and party donor Simon Lampton is drawn to Roza Hallwright, though he can't quite put his finger on why. She leads a quiet, comfortable, orderly life 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 is relatively calm about the prospect, but meeting Simon will bring turmoil to both their lives. In Soon, the Lampton family has come to spend a long hot summer at the Hallwrights' large beach house. 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. While Roza tells her young son made-up stories that reveal uncomfortable truths about their current lives, Simon will tell stories that conceal the truth about his. Gripping, clever and moving, these two novels are an intensely humane look at the choices people make.

Charlotte Grimshaw

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