Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Chimes, Anna Smaill’s highly anticipated new novel Bird Life follows a New Zealand woman arriving in Japan after the death of her brother, and the unlikely friendship she forges with another woman dealing with her own trauma.

The protagonist of When I open the shop by Modern Letters Fiction Prize-winner romesh dissanayake juggles grief, mounting debt and strange encounters in his small Te Whanganui-a-Tara noodle shop following his mother’s death.

In each book, grief is both a dislocating and disorientating force, and one that prompts new forms of connection, community and beginnings. The authors join Maggie Tweedie to discuss their empathetic and skilled novels of grief and survival.