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The New Animals
Pip Adam
Published by Victoria University Press
In this strange, confrontational, revelatory novel that holds a mirror up to contemporary
New Zealand culture, Pip Adam gets beneath the skin of her characters in ways that make you blink, double-take, and ultimately reassess your sense of the capabilities of ction. It’s
so vivid in imagery and imagination that it lingers in the mind, and a transition late in the novel is both wholly unexpected and utterly satisfying.
Sodden Downstream
Brannavan Gnanalingam
Published by Lawrence & Gibson Publishing
A simple premise goes a long way in Sodden Downstream, a linear narrative developed with wonderful tonal control. The empathy with which Brannavan Gnanalingam creates his characters—from the heroine Sakt to the assorted mis ts and samaritans she meets
on her epic journey—is balanced throughout
by a clear, sustained note of anger. The novel reveals New Zealand lives we seldom see
in literary ction and o ers a perspective from the economic and social margins that feels enormously timely.
Salt Picnic
Patrick Evans
Published by Victoria University Press
This complex, insightful and superbly written novel about the slippery bond between language and reality is an imaginative response to the ve months Janet Frame spent in Ibiza in 1956. Its inventive grasp of the island and the characters
is phenomenal, and the narrative voice remarkably adroit. Patrick Evans has had a decades-long interest in Frame as a modernist writer, and the Frameish notion that language can make things appear and suddenly disappear makes Salt Picnic a powerful conclusion to his Frame trilogy.
Baby
Annaleese Jochems
Published by Victoria University Press
A savagely funny and daring debut, this novel shimmers with feverish, fatalistic intensity. Baby
is a strange and strangely moving love story built on obsession, narcissism and damage. Annaleese Jochems writes with uncanny insight and skill as well as with a raw and urgent power: her characters take the reader on an unpredictable ride in which it’s unclear who’s in control until the very end.
Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize
Judges: Jenna Todd, Philip Matthews and Anna Smaill