Rebecca K Reilly

For fans of Schitt’s Creek and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, an irresistible and bighearted international bestseller that follows a brother and sister as they navigate queerness, multiracial identity, and the dramas big and small of their entangled, unconventional family, all while flailing their way to love. It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants. Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop intruding: her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word. Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings’ misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.

A Novel

Greta & Valdin

karina

I'm not very good at telling people how I feel. I don't know why I'm like that, and I don't always love to think about all the tiny pieces of me that add up to make a whole person. I feel concerned that too many of the pieces have something a bit wrong with them, like a puzzle you get at an op shop on holiday when it's raining. 

We named the baby G.V. I would still say "hello, Eevee” when I stood very quietly in the doorway of her room, just watching her. I hope that you like me. I hope you want to be my friend. I pull the blanket over Greta.

Laura Dobie

I can tell things are not going to be easy when I enter the post depot. There is a queue and the woman running the show looks as if she was once an excellent shot-putter. A man in front of me wearing a mismatched basketball uniform and Nike slides is holding a Malaysian passport, driver's licence, and what looks like a power bill. Jesus Christ, it's like trying to buy a gun in here. Or apply for a library card.

Thony is half a foot shorter and doesn't dress like he was once in an art pop band in the late eighties. He wears a lot of linen, turtlenecks and cashmere, I guess so that people know he's a gay European photographer without him having to explain. He also talks about normal things, like new cafés that have opened, and interior design, which is nice because my dad and siblings once had a three-hour argument about what really happened to the family of Tsar Nikolas II that fateful night in 1918.

I'm in the toilets of the very poorly lit Bluestone Room and I'm on a straight date with a man. How did this happen to me? I swiped through all the available women in three minutes and got jealous of my more sexually flexible friends and the hours and hours of swiping they had left, so I decided to give men another go. I can't really tell if I fnd people attractive or not by looking at their pictures, so I just swiped right on any guy who had a cat. I try not to look at my reflection in the mirror. I don’t know who this woman is. Greta, you idiot. What the fuck are you doing. If you wanted to meet some cats you could go and walk around in the suburbs. The cats in the pictures probably don't even belong to the men, they're just using them for attention. God. I can't believe this bar puts cucumber in gin.

The person I know stops wheeling his bike when we meet each other on the footpath, and smiles. ‘V, I haven't seen you in so long.’

‘Yeah, no, I haven't seen you either,’ I say. What a barbaric thing to say. Of course I haven't seen him if he hasn't seen me. Now it sounds like I'm some sort of failed spy.

We should go for coffee sometime is definitely code for when you want to end a conversation with someone and never see them again. People at my work say it all the time.

I can't for a second imagine my parents taking us on an expensive holiday involving flights and tourist activities, especially not to a ski resort where people go to be cold on purpose.

It seems like Greta's degree in analysing fictional literature has finally come in handy.

She has her hair curled and lipstick on, something I can never understand how people who work in offices get up early enough to do. When I worked in an office, I never looked like I was supposed to be there.

Greta & Valdin quotes

Join the club