Landed
Author:
Sue McCauley
Publisher:
David Bateman Ltd
ISBN:
9781776890576
Date published:
31 March 2023
Pages:
296
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$37.99
From the author of Other Halves (1982) which won both the Wattie Book of the Year Award and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and sold more than 20,000 copies.
It's the early 1990s in Timaru, and Brewer Howland has killed himself. His wife, Briar, is left stranded in a rapidly changing world. The future she took for granted has been obliterated and she must invent a new one. But how does a sixty-something widow go about creating a future for herself in a world she struggles to comprehend?
She has taken a sharp right-hand turn into familiar territory, and everything seems to be rapidly changing: values, language, telephones, families, race relations, gadgets. Amid this tsunami of 'progress' Briar must decide how and where to live out her life.
If her children and grandchildren had turned out to be lovingly bonded family cluster she'd hoped to raise they might have been future enough. But her children are scattered and disputations. Briar longs to return to the farmland where she grew up, but this seems unlikely. While she is trying to plan ahead, Briar's future is quietly taking on a shape of its own. Given time, and enough indecision, it seems an ominously sharp turn to the right can eventually lead you to just where you wanted to be. A wry, pensive, character-driven novel, Landed is Sue McCauley's first novel in decades.
About the author:
In the early 1980s, Sue McCauley's first novel, Other Halves, won both the Goodman Fielder Wattie and New Zealand Book Awards for fiction. It was reprinted numerous times, in New Zealand and overseas, selling in excess of 20,000 copies, and was made into a film. In subsequent years Sue wrote four more novels, two short story collections and a biography. She has also written drama for stage and TV and adapted her own novel for the film Other Halves. That, Sue's first book, was loosely based on the early - and unconventional - relationship between Sue and her now husband, Pat, who these days live on a farm near Dannevirke. They have been together for 50 years.
