Jamie, a forty-one-year-old drug addict recovering from surgery, goes somewhere he hasn't been in years - home, to Timaru, where his brother happens to be a chemist and his sister a doctor. Surely those two, with their access to pharmaceuticals - and their blood ties - will help him. And if that fails, their insomniac mother has various prescriptions rattling around in the cupboards of the old family home.

An old hand at deception, Jamie occupies one pole in this novel; at the other there is Sally, who is on the methadone programme and has a colicky baby, and Shane, the father of the baby, who has tried to go straight and is now watching his life leak away at the cheese factory. Fastened hard to small-town New Zealand, Chemistry moves with great force to an unexpected and eloquent conclusion.